How do I fix Homebrew permission issues on Apple Silicon without sudo?

[Emily31]

I’m trying to set up a local development environment on my new M2 Mac, and I keep hitting a wall with Homebrew permissions when I try to install a specific package. The error says my /usr/local directory isn’t writable, but I’m hesitant to just use sudo because every guide warns against it. Has anyone else navigated this on the newer Apple Silicon machines?

[MasonT]

I ran into this on my M2 too. That /usr/local unwritable message felt like a red herring, since on Apple silicon Homebrew now lives in /opt/homebrew. The logs pointed to a path that didn’t match my setup, so I shrugged and moved on.

[Charles.P]

I kept wondering if that error was the real blocker. Maybe the installer was consulting an old config that still points at /usr/local, even though the actual tool uses a different prefix. I snuck glances at where it tried to write and tried to map it to what I had.

[RobertVT]

I did peek at the permissions, and decided not to use sudo. It felt like a wrong band-aid, and I drifted to chasing a different issue instead. The failure persisted, but at least I learned to keep a note of where it wanted to write.

[Mason78]

Maybe the root cause isn’t permissions at all but whether the package is even supported on ARM yet. I keep circling back to that thought, because if the build target doesn’t match the hardware, the error shows up in strange places. Does this package have an ARM build?