mongrel unicorn - Oct 2011 - Home directory for workers

When unicorn is started as the root user and the worker processes run as as an
unprivileged user because of the "user" option in unicorn.conf then
the home
directory of the worker processes is still "/root".  This causes
trouble with
GPGME at least, which expects to find encryption keys in the user''s
home
directory.

Apologies in advance if this has been fixed since 4.1.1.

- neil

neil at dist.ro wrote:
> When unicorn is started as the root user and the worker processes run
> as as an unprivileged user because of the "user" option in
> unicorn.conf then the home directory of the worker processes is still
> "/root".  This causes trouble with GPGME at least, which expects
to
> find encryption keys in the user''s home directory.
You mean the ENV["HOME"] value?  This typically isn''t changed
when
changing privileges in other daemons like nginx.  Changing ENV["HOME"]
automatically inside unicorn has the potential to break existing setups
badly, so it won''t be done.

However, you can set it in your after_fork hook (or anywhere else in
your unicorn config file)

  after_fork do |server,worker|
    ENV["HOME"] = "/home/user"
  end

You can even set it in the shell when starting unicorn:

  HOME=/home/user unicorn -c unicorn.conf.rb