failed to create directory '/yay': mkdir /yay: permission denied

[ArthurBorsboom]

After switching to another desktop environment, I noticed that yay stopped working with the following error message.

failed to create directory '/yay': mkdir /yay: permission denied

Even yay --version and yay --help do not work.

After setting XDG_CACHE_HOME yay starts working again. According the XDG specifications, the variable XDG_CACHE_HOME is not mandatory and each application should automatically fallback.

$XDG_CACHE_HOME defines the base directory relative to which user-specific non-essential data files should be stored.
If $XDG_CACHE_HOME is either not set or empty, a default equal to $HOME/.cache should be used.

Source: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html

Can yay be fixed so that it won't fail on the missing XDG_CACHE_HOME environment variable?

[Jguer]

yay uses both XDG_CACHE_HOME and HOME, otherwise it defaults to a tmpdir

func getCacheHome() (string, error) {
    uid := os.Geteuid()

    if cacheHome := os.Getenv("XDG_CACHE_HOME"); cacheHome != "" && uid != 0 {
        cacheDir := filepath.Join(cacheHome, "yay")
        if err := initDir(cacheDir); err == nil {
            return cacheDir, nil
        }
    }

    if cacheHome := os.Getenv("HOME"); cacheHome != "" && uid != 0 {
        cacheDir := filepath.Join(cacheHome, ".cache", "yay")
        if err := initDir(cacheDir); err == nil {
            return cacheDir, nil
        }
    }

    if uid == 0 && os.Getenv("SUDO_USER") == "" && os.Getenv("DOAS_USER") == "" {
        return systemdCache, nil // Don't create directory if systemd-run takes care of it
    }

    tmpDir := filepath.Join(os.TempDir(), "yay")

    return tmpDir, initDir(tmpDir)
}

Can you confirm if $HOME is set on your system?

As well check the ~/.config/yay/config.json's builddir for anything unusual

[Jguer]

I can reproduce this by setting config.json to

{
  "buildDir": "/yay"
}

why it gets set to that is my question

[ArthurBorsboom]

This issue happened a month ago (about). I will take some time to reproce the problem again and report back with more details.

On Mon, 3 Apr 2023, 18:18 Jo, @.***> wrote:

I can reproduce this by setting config.json to

{ "buildDir": "/yay" }

why it gets set to that is my question

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