Published on

When the Homebrew command brew update fails

Last Modified on
Last modified on
Authors
When the Homebrew command brew update fails
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels

Today I had to update my version of node on this site. Again, I was having issues with GatsbyJS. My deploy failed because of the "Error: Cannot find module 'gatsby/dist/utils/create-content-digest'". Damned if I know what that is. That's a new one to me.

I have so far tried several solutions I came across when googling the issue, but none have worked so far. It could be a Node.js incompatibility. Things worked so well when I used Node.js 11.14.0 and Gatsby.JS 2.10.0? But I knew that eventually I would have to move on. And I did have to. However, this resulted in this new issue that I now have to resolve.

But I digress. During this process, one of the solutions involved updating Homebrew. So I did the following in Terminal:

brew update

But instead of updating, the following was printed out to the Terminal window:

fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com': terminal prompts disabled
Error: Fetching [redacted] failed!

This was probably because I had recently upgraded my OSX operating system to Catalina. It must have screwed up my Homebrew install. It had nothing to do with my SSH public and private Github SSH keys, because I have had no issues pushing to Github. In order to fix this problem, I had to type the following command in the Terminal window:

git config --global --add url."git@github.com:".insteadOf "https://github.com/"

When I typed brew update again, I got the following in Terminal:

Another active Homebrew update process is already in progress.
Please wait for it to finish or terminate it to continue.

I hit Ctrl + C and killed the brew update process. However, when I typed

brew update

I got the following:

ERROR: Repository not found.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
Error: homebrew/homebrew-dupes does not exist! Run 'brew untap homebrew/homebrew-dupes'

I followed the above instructions, and typed the following in Terminal:

brew untap homebrew/homebrew-dupes

It resulted in:

Untapping homebrew/dupes...
Untapped (117 files, 133.5KB).

Then I typed the command:

brew update

which resulted in:

Already up-to-date.

Now I was ready to use Homebrew again.

View on GitHub