Classic confinement should allow preservation of $HOME

[Mike Pontillo]

I'm trying to snap something that assumes that $HOME will be unchanged when it executes. For example, in order to use the app, you are required to do something like:

    mkdir $HOME/.my-snap
    my-snap --baz $HOME/.my-snap
    my-snap <args>

I'm trying to use classic confinement to do so. (I also tried using the 'home' interface, but that didn't seem to have any effect.)

When you run `my-snap` it assumes that the user has already properly set up $HOME/.my-snap. You are required to set up $HOME/my-snap by running one of the utility apps that ships with the snap.

So I need a way to preserve $HOME so that it points to my original $HOME, not $HOME/snap/[...].

$ snap version
snap 2.24
snapd 2.24
series 16
ubuntu 16.04
kernel 4.4.0-75-generic

[Mike Pontillo (mpontillo)]

Not sure I filed this in the correct place; adding Snappy. Though I suppose I'll leave the bug in both in case a fix is needed in both places.

[Mike Pontillo (mpontillo)]

My problem was that I was incorrectly specifying the 'home' plug. When I changed the Snapcraft YAML as follows, everything worked as expected:

apps:
  foo:
    plugs:
     - home
    command: bin/foo
    ...

[Mike Pontillo (mpontillo)]

Hm, I'm still seeing intermittent behavior here.

$ snap run --shell foo
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

$ echo $HOME
/home/user/snap/foo/x1

$ exit
$ snap interfaces | grep home
:home foo

This is with it snapped in devmode. For some reason, it seemed to work when I tried it earlier; I don't know what changed.

[Zygmunt Krynicki (zyga)]

I just tested this with snapd 2.27.2 and HOME is not altered for snaps that use classic confinement. I'm marking this as FIX-RELEASED.