Today I learned about brew reinstall. This command allows to reinstall the currently installed version of a package. Now, why would that be useful? Because sometimes things go wrong. In my case, the installation of the latest PHP 5.6 release went wrong somewhere. Since I am generally bad at reading log messages, I did not notice that until I actually needed it working.

At first, it threw tons of errors at me of which I thought they originated from the code I was trying to execute - wrong. Then I realized that I might not have updated all the extensions I needed. Also wrong. Then I fooled around a bit and stumbled across homebrews reinstall command. It took a few cups of coffee for

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brew reinstall php56

to finish but that’s okay. It magically worked again.

Literally only minutes later was it when I discovered that my imagemagick installation was not compiled with webp support. Having learned about reinstall I could solve that problem without a stack overflow marathon.

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brew reinstall imagemagick --with-webp

Another cup of coffee.