The Munroe Group Archive

Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten when running brew update

14 October 2013

Tonight while running brew update on my Mac, I received the following error messages:

brew update && brew install phantomjs
error: Your local changes to the following files would be overwritten by merge:
  Library/Formula/imagemagick.rb
Please, commit your changes or stash them before you can merge.

To fix the problem, I had to run the following:

cd `brew --prefix`
git remote add origin https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git
git fetch origin
git reset --hard origin/master

This was documented at the homebrew project within Github, https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/11448#issuecomment-4959157.