I’m using Homebrew on my Macbook. It is a great addition to installing software when you are used to package managers from the Linux world.

There’s also an extension called Homebrew Cask which allows you to manage MacOS applications, such as Adium or Gimp. This saves you the hassle of manually downloading the package/dmg files and automates the installation/updates.

Lately when doing an update again, there was a notice about a changed Caskroom location.

michi@mbmif ~ $ brew cask list
Warning: The default Caskroom location has moved to /usr/local/Caskroom.
Please migrate your Casks to the new location and delete /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom,
or if you would like to keep your Caskroom at /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom, add the
following to your HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS:
  --caskroom=/opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom
For more details on each of those options, see https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask/issues/21913.
apache-directory-studio  filezilla                gimp                     macvim                   vlc                      xquartz
bitbar                   firefox                  java7                    mysqlworkbench           wireshark

Ok, what would I do now? “Migration” could just mean moving the directories. But wait, the installed applications could be symlinked into ~/Applications instead of being moved (#13966).

Looking into the mentioned github issue #21913 shed some light on how to fix it. Moving the directories will make “brew cask list” shut up about the changed location, but later uninstalls will fail due to dangling symlinks. The solution is simple – force an installation again after moving the installed casks.

michi@mbmif ~ $ mv /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom /usr/local
michi@mbmif ~ $ brew cask list
apache-directory-studio  filezilla                gimp                     macvim                   vlc                      xquartz
bitbar                   firefox                  java7                    mysqlworkbench           wireshark

michi@mbmif ~ $ for cask in $(brew cask list); do brew cask install $cask --force; done

Done 🙂

3 Comments

Tokra on December 17, 2016 at 10:47 pm

Thanks this helped
- 何伟 on December 23, 2016 at 5:50 pm
  
  Great job! Thanks 🙂
Andi Zeidler on January 11, 2017 at 9:43 pm

You can avoid installing everything again by recreating the symlinks using:

gfind ~/Applications/ ~/Library/ /usr/local/ -type l -lname ‘/opt/homebrew-cask/*’ -printf “ln -vsf ‘%l’ ‘%p’\n” | sed s,/opt/homebrew-cask/,/usr/local/, | bash

Please note that you’ll need to `brew install findutils` first… 🙂