brew installation of elasticsearch failing

Been trying to install ElasticSearch using brew, however, all my attempts fail and error

    Error: An exception occurred within a child process:
  NoMethodError: undefined method `path' for nil:NilClass
Did you mean?  paths

is fired back at me. anyone ever crossed this?
brew install --debug output is:

➜  ~ brew install --debug elasticsearch
Updating Homebrew...
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/brew.rb (Formulary::FormulaLoader): loading /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula/elasticsearch.rb
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-8.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -version
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/zulu-8.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java -version
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/build.rb (Formulary::FromPathLoader): loading /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core/Formula/elasticsearch.rb
Error: An exception occurred within a child process:
  NoMethodError: undefined method `path' for nil:NilClass
Did you mean?  paths
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/extend/os/mac/extend/ENV/super.rb:112:in `setup_build_environment'
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/build.rb:88:in `install'
/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Homebrew/build.rb:196:in `<main>'

thanks!

Eventually it was due to the fact xcode was outdated. Updating xcode fixed the problem.

The instructions for Installing Elasticsearch on macOS with Homebrew on the elastic website suggest using a different formula, namely:

brew tap elastic/tap

then

brew install elastic/tap/elasticsearch-full

or

brew install elastic/tap/elasticsearch-oss

depending on whether you want the non-Free (but still $0.00) or OSS version.

I haven't actually tried that formula myself, but I have just had success on macOS Catalina with brew install openjdk@11 to get the required Java version, then I installed the tarfile of logstash-7.6.2 by hand, making sure to do export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/opt/openjdk@11 before running the logstash program; I assume the same approach will work with elasticsearch, although the official formula above is probably simpler.

The following is a temporary work-around until Homebrew is fixed.

1. Disable the Homebrew auto-update by either prefixing your brew commands like this: HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 brew install elasticsearch or setting an environment variable in your Bash .profile as export HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1. (I am using the latter.)

2. If you have Homebrew installed as a GIT repository under /usr/local/Homebrew, go to that directory to review the GIT log. You should see a recent merge to the stable branch introduced new code to super.rb:
   > 2ae2680 (tag: 2.2.12, stable) Merge pull request #7301 from Bo98/cmake-sdkroot

3. You want to checkout a previous commit in your /usr/local/Homebrew git repo. This did the trick for me:

   <strike>/usr/local/Homebrew> git checkout stable^</strike><br/>
   <strike>HEAD is now at 6e3a293... Merge pull request #7300 from bayandin/patch-1</strike>

> CORRECTION! The "stable" branch moved recently to 2.2.13. The commit history still contains the problem commit: 2ae2680 (tag: 2.2.12) Merge pull request #7301 from Bo98/cmake-sdkroot.

Checkout the commit-before-the-tag instead.

/usr/local/Homebrew> git checkout -q 2.2.12^
/usr/local/Homebrew> git branch -vv --no-color
* (HEAD detached at 6e3a293) 6e3a293 Merge pull request #7300 from bayandin/patch-1
   master c9ffde6 [origin/master] Merge pull request #7351 from Bo98/branch-encode
   stable 3d9cf83 Merge pull request #7346 from Bo98/pr-pull

4. When you are ready to undo the changes in step #3, running brew update will checkout the stable branch (at whatever state that will be).