Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Set the HOME env variable to be consistent with the used home directory #1296

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
Open

Set the HOME env variable to be consistent with the used home directory #1296

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions src/cmd/create.go
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -426,6 +426,7 @@ func createContainer(container, image, release, authFile string, showCommandToEn
"--volume", homeDirMountArg,
"--volume", toolboxPathMountArg,
"--volume", runtimeDirectoryMountArg,
"--env", fmt.Sprintf("HOME=%s", currentUser.HomeDir),
Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Nitpick: could you please move this further up between --dns and --env?

I suppose this will bake HOME into the podman inspect JSON as /home/foo? Just like we do for TOOLBOX_PATH and XDG_RUNTIME_DIR?

If so, then we need to remember that there are two processes with two different UIDs that are started by Toolbx inside the containers. The first is the entry point of the container that runs as root:root and the other is the process running as the user's UID that the user actually interacts with. Currently, the entry point has HOME set to /home/foo on the first start, and then /root for subsequent starts.

I am worried that baking HOME to /home/foo will make the entry point (running as root:root) always use it as it's home directory. If the entry point ends up creating some files in its home directory as a side-effect, these will pollute the user's home directory too, and, potentially, even conflict with the user's own files.

This isn't a huge problem because this is already the case for the first start, so, I suppose things are working alright at the moment. However, it will entrench it a bit more.

Since we are already trying to clean up this weird oddity with the HOME environment variable, I think we should also take the step to ensure that the entry point running as root:root has HOME set to the correct value for root.

}...)

createArgs = append(createArgs, avahiSocketMount...)
Expand Down