Official nodejs Docker images need to be rewritten to support roots about roots HOT 1 OPEN

So if you are running as root, it doesn't really make much sense that you'd get a permissions error, as the root account should have permission to access anything, especially its own home directory.

I have not had much experience with docker, so I can't really give a lot of info about how docker works with respect to root accounts and permissions, but I can assure you that what's happening here is exactly what roots intends to happen. It's finding the user's home directory and placing a configuration file there.

It's likely that a lot of other node libraries don't use this functionality because they do not store global persistent configuration information. Roots does however. It keeps track of whether the user wants to disable analytics, their default template preferences, and stores any roots templates they have installed. Generally the active user's own home directory is pretty much a sure bet to be something that user will have access to (although apparently its not the case in this instance, confusingly).

There is no question that this is an issue with the container. The fact that the root user cannot access its own home dir is not normal, nor does it make any sense. This part of roots' installation is indeed not extremely common with other node libraries (although there are a number that do have it, and would encounter the same issue). But that doesn't change the fact that this is an issue with the docker container, and not with roots, which, judging by the error you posted here, is doing exactly what it was intended to do.

Let me lay out the issue as clearly as I can so it might help you with reporting it.

In node, you can run the following code to get a user's home directory, which that user should always have permission to view and modify or there are serious issues with the machine's configuration:

var os = require('os')
os.homedir()

From the command line, you can get the home directory as such:

echo $HOME

What roots does on installation is run exactly this code, then creates any nested folders that might be necessary inside the home dir. Generally, it will create $HOME/.config/roots, in order to store the global config information.

The issue here is that the user does not have permission to modify their own home directory. Now, if this is some type of strange docker limitation, you can always change the home directory by setting the $HOME variable in bash to somewhere that the user does have access to before running the roots install. Otherwise, I'd call this a bug with the container.

from roots.