On WSL: Running Homebrew as root is extremely dangerous...

[yumetsuro]

Hi everyone.

Today i needed Homebrew to do some things, so i tried to install following the guides, also the one on the official site.
When i finally managed to set up and get brew thought the alternative installation
This
git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/brew ~/.linuxbrew/Homebrew mkdir ~/.linuxbrew/bin ln -s ../Homebrew/bin/brew ~/.linuxbrew/bin eval $(~/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)

I proceeded to use it and it gives me the same error every time:
"Error: Running Homebrew as root is extremely dangerous and no longer supported. As Homebrew does not drop privileges on installation you would be giving all build scripts full access to your system. "

I tried to use sudo chown -R $(whoami) $(brew --prefix)/* and other commands but nothing worked.

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as WSL

Thanks in advance for the help.

[carlocab]

Do you have sudo access on your machine? If you do, I recommend doing

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

[yumetsuro]

When i run the second command it gives me:

==> Checking for sudo access (which may request your password)... Don't run this as root!

[pedinil]

when i was using the root password , it was saying the Sorry, try again. and i was thinking may be my password is wrong but after
running rm -rf ~/.linuxbrew , it is working fine , i think there is bug the script

[gromgit]

There may still be bugs in the installer script, but this probably isn't one of them.

when i was using the root password

The installer uses sudo, which asks for your password, not root's.

[gromgit]

What's the output of id?

[yumetsuro]

This: uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),27(sudo),1000(docker)

Also the current user is a sudoer

[gromgit]

That's what the installer is complaining about. It expects to populate the Homebrew hierarchy as you, not root, so you have to run it as a user other than root, i.e. don't run the installer in a sudo environment..

[yumetsuro]

It worked thank you!

[BloemendaalEzra]

How do you change the user? my output of id is uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

[lanzoninicola]

Although it was late, I believe this solution may help others in the future. Here are the steps I took to solve the problem:

I created a new user by running the following command:
sudo adduser [username]

I added the new user to the "sudo" group by running the following command:
usermod -aG sudo [username]

To check if the user was successfully added to the group, I ran the following command:
getent group <groupname> | cut-d: -f4

I opened a new Ubuntu session to ensure that the changes took effect.

Finally, I installed Homebrew following the official documentation.

[gromgit]

To check if the user was successfully added to the group, I ran the following command:
getent group <groupname> | cut-d: -f4

getent is a GNUism, better to use the POSIX-standard id:

id <username> | grep sudo

[dersimn]

"is extremely dangerous", wow.. let's run it on Ubuntu then where your default user has password-less sudo access on all commands.. genius.

[SMillerDev]

If you have a good way to detect that programatically we'd happily review a pull request that warns users about that too.

[dersimn]

I would, but I'd also like to implement on some kind of "I know what I'm doing"-override-switch 🤔 on certain experimental machines it wouldn't be a problem for me to run this as root, tbh.

Note for future-me:
sudo -l outputs a list of all sudo-able commands, grep this for something like (ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL.

[trallnag]

There's no point in it at least for WSL. Privilege escalation to root is always possible by running powershell from WSL and then starting a shell as root in the WSL distribution. This does not require any password

[radutomy]

This is extremely annoying. I have a lot of experiemental throw-away VMs that I'm running as root.. I just discovered that it's impossible now to install homebrew on them without adding a sudo user.

[dersimn]

See this for a workaround: https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/6d48890a7430dc65a8e5718071ecdcee7d2a29c1/install.sh#L365