Install script fails with brew: No such file or directory

[infotexture]

Output of brew config

brew: command not found

Output of brew doctor

brew: command not found

Description of issue

Up until a few days ago, I had a healthy Homebrew installation that was humming along fine until brew doctor told me to check out master as described in #4120.

I found this puzzling, but followed the instructions, and now the brew command itself is no longer found, although the ARM-native installation location /opt/homebrew/bin is first in my PATH.

I went looking for the executable there, and it is indeed missing, so I re-ran the installation script per https://brew.sh:

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

— but oddly enough, the install script fails and complains that it cannot find the brew binary it's meant to install:

==> Checking for `sudo` access (which may request your password)...
Password:
==> This script will install:
/opt/homebrew/bin/brew
/opt/homebrew/share/doc/homebrew
/opt/homebrew/share/man/man1/brew.1
/opt/homebrew/share/zsh/site-functions/_brew
/opt/homebrew/etc/bash_completion.d/brew
/opt/homebrew

Press RETURN/ENTER to continue or any other key to abort:
==> /usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/chown -R username:admin /opt/homebrew
==> Downloading and installing Homebrew...
HEAD is now at 39e158fb9 Merge pull request #14501 from p-linnane/cookbook-update
/opt/homebrew/Library/Homebrew/brew.sh: line 155: /opt/homebrew/bin/brew: No such file or directory
Failed during: /opt/homebrew/bin/brew update --force --quiet

I assume this is somehow related to the recent architectural changes from Homebrew/brew#14359, but I can't figure out how to recover if I can't re-install.

I still have my local Homebrew/homebrew-core tap at /opt/homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core, and that pulls the latest changes from the upstream master branch, but I still can't re-install brew.

— Any idea what's going on here, and how to recover? 🤔

[infotexture]

Tried setting the beta HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API environment variable per
https://docs.brew.sh/Installation#skip-tap-cloning-beta, but that doesn't seem to change anything.

[infotexture]

Yeah, looks like the HOMEBREW_INSTALL_FROM_API option has since been removed from the docs in favor of HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API.

Tried setting that per the Default Tap Cloning section, but neither 0 nor 1 changes anything either.

[SMillerDev]

What's currently in that directory?

[gromgit]

And what's the output of

env | grep HOMEBREW_

?

[infotexture]

What's currently in that directory?

@SMillerDev Which directory do you mean? 🤔

If it's this, it's just whatever earlier Homebrew versions cloned there:

I still have my local Homebrew/homebrew-core tap at /opt/homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core

If I navigate there with a Git client, I can fetch & pull as usual, so the repo seems intact.

[infotexture]

And what's the output of env | grep HOMEBREW_ ?

bash-5.2$ env | grep HOMEBREW_
HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1

Tried setting that to 0 instead, but the results are the same.

[cho-m]

Sounds like your git repo isn't clean.

/opt/homebrew/Library/Homebrew/brew.sh: line 155: /opt/homebrew/bin/brew: No such file or directory

bin/brew should be maintained by git (https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/blob/master/bin/brew). If it is missing, then there is something wrong with the state of the git repo.

---

Try going to the repo directory and checking status, e.g.

❯ cd /opt/homebrew

❯ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

If output shows something other than above, then it will probably need to be manually fixed.

[infotexture]

Sounds like your git repo isn't clean.

💯 That was indeed the problem.

I had been looking at /opt/homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core, but didn't think to verify /opt/homebrew.

When I looked there, I found that it was checked out to an outdated stable branch state, and contained a stash entry WIP on stable: e4c18be30 … that had apparently been generated a few days ago when I was prompted to stash local changes.

Resetting to master fixed everything, so I unset the new environment variables.

Thanks for your help! 🙏

[JideijeEmeka]

See what I get as response
How did you reset to master that solved the issue?...Please help

[gromgit]

It would be highly unusual for the whole of /usr/local to be under Git management.

You want to cd /usr/local/Homebrew instead, assuming you're on an Intel Mac.