What is the best/safest way to reinstall Homebrew?

Question

I am getting issues with permissions in Homebrew: After I installed Node and tried to install npm using the curl command Homebrew tells you to use, it would fail due to EACC

Answer 1

The way to reinstall Homebrew is completely remove it and start over. The Homebrew FAQ has a link to a shell script to uninstall homebrew.

If the only thing you've installed in /usr/local is homebrew itself, you can just rm -rf /usr/local/* /usr/local/.git to clear it out. But /usr/local/ is the standard Unix directory for all extra binaries, not just Homebrew, so you may have other things installed there. In that case uninstall_homebrew.sh is a better bet. It is careful to only remove homebrew's files and leave the rest alone.