Setting system user home directory

Miroslav Lachman 000.fbsd at quip.cz
Sat Dec 16 14:20:26 UTC 2017


Dmytro Bilokha wrote on 2017/12/16 14:59:
> On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 01:44:05PM +0100, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
>> Dmytro Bilokha wrote on 2017/12/16 10:40:
>>> Hello, Everyone!
>>>
>>> I'm trying to change www/payara port to make it run under the payara
>>> user instead of root.
>>> I've added the following line to the UIDs file:
>>>
>>> payara:*:221:221::0:0:Payara Application Server
>>> user:/nonexistent:/usr/sbin/nologin
>>>
>>> And this line to the port makefile:
>>>
>>> USERS=        payara
>>>
>>> Also, I've made some another changes to the port's scripts to start
>>> service under payara user.
>>> Everything seems to be fine, but the service on start/shutdown creates
>>> some preferences files,
>>> caches, etc in the payara user's homedir.
>>> The problem is, that it is impossible to create these files in
>>> /nonexistent. This fact makes
>>> service to show some annoying warnings on every startup/shutdown.
>>> To make service to work properly I want to create directory writable by
>>> the payara user and
>>> set it as payara's homedir.
>>> And I don't want to put these dir under the /usr/home/, it should be
>>> somewhere in the application,
>>> like /usr/local/payara-4.1.2.173/prefs.
>>> As far as I understand, payara user will be created automatically by the
>>> bsd.port.pre.mk file included in the port's makefile. But, during every
>>> installation somehow payara user's homedir
>>> should be changed. I can do it with the following one-liner:
>>>
>>> /usr/sbin/pw usermod payara -d ${DATADIR}/prefs
>>>
>>> So, the questions are:
>>> 1. Is it a proper way of doing such kind of things?
>>> 2. Where in the port's makefile should I put my one-liner? Will it be OK
>>> to make it like this:
>>>
>>> .......head of the make file with setting variables and so on is
>>> here......
>>> .include <bsd.port.pre.mk>
>>> do-install:
>>>      .........doing some work here......
>>>      @/usr/sbin/pw usermod payara -d ${DATADIR}/prefs
>>> .include <bsd.port.post.mk>
>>> ....end of the makefile.....
>>>
>>> Many thanks for your attention and help.
>>
>> I don't know Payara but applications should not write its files to
>> /usr/local. This should work even if /usr/local is mounted Read Only.
>> If you need to store configuration (preferences) then it should be in
>> /usr/local/etc/payara.
>> If the application writes some data files like databases, it goes under
>> /var/db/payara and log in to /var/log/payara.log or /var/log/payara
>> (directory)
>>
>> Miroslav Lachman
>
> Thanks for the information. Now I'm a little bit confused.
> I've checked and seems to me that nither www/tomcat85 (servlet
> container) nor www/glassfish and java/wildfly10 (application servers)
> ports follow this convention.
> All of them has directories for logs, configuration and Java
> applications under the
> /usr/local. Is there something special in Java servers ports?


I know there are ports not following this convention (and I don't 
understand why). Those ports are making troubles if you want to serve 
/usr/local as read only NFS for example.

Miroslav Lachman




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