Homebrew: Your Command Line Tools are too outdated

Like many others I make use of Homebrew as the package manager on my Mac. Usually it’s quite reliable, yet when I recently tried to install Terraform from the brew repository I was shown the error “Your Command Line Tools are too outdated”. This post will cover the steps I used to fix the issue.

1.0 The problem

The message “Error: Your Command Line Tools are too outdated” is shown.

2.0 Why does this happen?

There are many ways this issue could arise (far too many to list here). Some of the key suspects are:

• Command Line Tools for Xcode not being installed
• A recent Mac OS upgrade
• Firewall app (LuLu) blocking update attempts

3.0 Resolution

First, temporarily disable any 3rd part firewall apps like LuLu or Little Snitch.

Then open Terminal and run the following commands:

sudo rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools 
sudo xcode-select --install 

Once complete perform a Homebrew update:

brew update && brew upgrade

4.0 Summary

That’s it!

If you have found this post helpful please let me know by dropping a comment below. Otherwise, thanks for reading.