Anyone happen to know a way around this specifically? Trying to install some stuff and brew just bails after getting 5xx from github.com.
Periodically you can merge upstream into your clone to get updated recipes. (e.g., the aforementioned cronjob can mirror master from github to remotes/upstream/master in your repo, then separately you merge that into your master).
Your servers are now immune to github outages[1] and you can review recipe updates before your servers update to those recipes.
[1] unless of course the recipes you're using are hosted on github. But you could recursively mirror those sources too and modify the recipes as needed.
edit: I'm on a mobile device but I can provide further details the next time I'm in front of a keyboard in case this wasn't clear.
Yeah, the problem I was having at the time was that Homebrew was trying to fetch a tarball hosted on Github. I was just whinging though, that was the only time I've ever hit that particular snag.
The system you propose would be great, but more work than switching to running headless Linux VMs on OSX for most dev work ;) This is something I have been drifting toward for a while now, using Vagrant.