It seems that every time I try to install a package with homebrew, something goes wrong. For the past year, I kept getting the “Failed to verify attestation. Retrying in XXs” message but only bothered looking for a fix today. Despite being on the latest version, brew would repeatedly fail this step with the reason being “env: node: No such file or directory”. What’s even weirder is that I did have node on my $PATH, just not linked with homebrew.

It turns out that the fix was to turn off developer mode with brew developer off (you can check developer mode status with brew developer) and running brew update to downgrade my version of brew from the latest commit on master [1] to the latest stable release. If anyone else is facing this very specific probem, I hope this saves you a bit of sanity.

[1] okay, you can call it main. I don’t care