Homebrew rocks as a package management tool for Max OS X. Except when it doesn’t.
A couple of days ago when I ran
brew doctor
I got a whole slew of messages instead of the
$ brew doctor
Your system is raring to brew.
output that I expected. The primary issue centered around a file called voldemort.rb. I have no idea what in my collection of brews required that formula. Rather than go through a potentially lengthy debugging session to figure out how to untangle the mess I decided to just wipe out brew and reinstall everything.
I started by making a list of all the brews I had installed
$ brew list > ~/Desktop/brews.txt
Next quick Google search lead me to Uninstalling brew (so I can reinstall) by Eneko Alonso. His posting neatly outlined these steps for removing brew from your system:
$ cd `brew --prefix`
$ rm -rf Cellar
$ brew prune
$ rm -rf Library .git .gitignore bin/brew README.md share/man/man1/brew
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew
To install brew again:
$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Next up you need to reinstall any brews you had on hand. Since doing this to my laptop my brew doctor output is clean and raring to go.