can't brew install node

Question

I am trying to upgrade my node via homebrew but ran into a problem because I think I tried to download through the website. I am very new to terminal. I\'ve tried to search

Answer 1

I ran into this problem on a new MacBook Pro on Mac OS High Sierra. I gleaned brew was trying to use directories named include and lib under /usr/local that was not there. Since root owns /usr I had to do it manually - making sure that whoami owner matches peer directories in /usr/local:

sudo mkdir /usr/local/include
chown `whoami`:admin /usr/local/include 
sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib
chown `whoami`:admin /usr/local/lib

And then to match the other directories in /usr/local I did:

chmod 775 /usr/local/include
chmod 775 /usr/local/lib

then the following worked:

brew uninstall node 
brew install node