Issue on docs - install path

[tjjarvinen]

Path: /cli/installation

Is it a good idea to install to a path (/usr/local/bin) that needs admin permissions, instead of using local user directory, like ~/.local/bin, that does not need admin permissions?

I mean, in general you should not run anything from internet with admin permissions!

[rohitpaulk]

We copied most of this from other installers like https://sentry.io/get-cli/. Not sure if there are edge cases here (some systems might not have ~/.local/bin included in PATH?).

[rohitpaulk]

And to be clear, the program doesn't run with root permissions - we only need root permissions to place the program inside /usr/local/bin. If you need to run a program with root permissions you'd still need to do sudo <program_name> unless you're already root.

[tjjarvinen]

You could check if ~/.local/bin is in the PATH, and if not, print instructions to add it into the PATH. Or even better, ask where to install it, with ~/.local/bin as the default location.

I am mostly concerned with needing root permission for three reasons:

1. Security habits - don't give root permissions to random installlers
2. Not all user might even have access to root permissions (sudo user rights)
3. The only reason to install under /usr/local/bin is to get the CLI into PATH - this is a very bad reason

[rohitpaulk]

The only reason to install under /usr/local/bin is to get the CLI into PATH - this is a very bad reason

Don't see why this is a bad reason, this is exactly what the installer is designed for. We want users to be able to use codecrafters.

@tjjarvinen this has to be a "solved" problem, not like we're the only ones who offer a CLI installation script. Do you know of other popular installer scripts that use ~/.local/bin? Happy to take a look and see if there's something we can copy. This just doesn't seem like somewhere where we need to innovate or do anything different than the status quo.

[tjjarvinen]

uv is a program that installs to ~/.local/bin by default. rustup defaults to ~/.cargo/bin, so it could be used as an example also.

[rohitpaulk]

uv is a good example! (Rustup seems to write to a Rust-specific path so that doesn't apply to us.)

Looking into what uv does, it looks like they can't assume that any of the paths they use will be in PATH, and instead they go and edit the PATH variable for the user by editing shell profiles:

[tjjarvinen]

You could call

echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n' | grep -q "$HOME/.local/bin" && echo "Exists in PATH" || echo "Not in PATH"

to check, if ~/.local/bin is in PATH.

• If yes, promt users where to install with ~/.local/bin as the default.
• If not, promt users where to install with /usr/local/bin as the default.
• Check if writing permissions are present in the location, if not use sudo.

This would allow users control where to install, with default install going into PATH as well.