Cannot start hello-world snap: mkdir: cannot create directory '/home/martin/snap/hello-world': Permission denied -- don't create $HOME/snaps as root

[Martin Pitt]

I am currently following the tutorial at http://snapcraft.io/ and tried to install my first snap (under current yakkety amd64):

$ sudo apt install -y snapd
$ sudo snap install hello-world
74.08 MB / 74.28 MB [=================================================================>_] 99.73 % 2.12 MB/s

hello-world (stable) 6.3 from 'canonical' installed

$ LC_ALL=C /snap/bin/hello-world
mkdir: cannot create directory '/home/martin/snap/hello-world': Permission denied

strace shows:

[pid 14728] chdir("martin") = 0
[pid 14728] mkdir("snap", 0777) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
[pid 14728] chdir("snap") = 0
[pid 14728] mkdir("hello-world", 0777) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
[pid 14728] chdir("hello-world") = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Indeed I have an already existing root-owned ~/snap directory, as I was asked a few days to install the ubuntu-device-flash beta snap. That program needs to run as root and was the first-ever snap that I installed.

I suggest to never create ~/snap with root privileges to avoid that, and also to avoid breaking backups etc.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: snapd 2.13+16.10
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-9136.55-generic 4.4.16
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-9136-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: i3
Date: Mon Aug 29 22:07:30 2016
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
SourcePackage: snapd
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This was a bug in snap-confine/snap-run that is fixed now. I verified that it is no longer reproducible.