yarn install on linux uses /tmp for executables but mount is "noexec" (permission denied)

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On Linux (Ubuntu 20.04), using yarn 3.2.0, had an issue where yarn install would always fail with a number of "permission denied" during the Link step, where it was trying to use other modules installed in node_modules as part of the same install (e.g. node-gyp, node-gyp-build, node-pre-gyp, prebuild-install).

Turns out after a long period of investigation (mainly focused on file permissions because of the permission denied error) that it was in fact down to Yarn's use of the /tmp folder, which it apparently uses during its Link step for placing and executing some files. This is all very well, but not on a Linux server which is following "best practice" in having the noexec flag on the /tmp mount point (see: /opt/fstab) ! noexec prevents use of executables, hence the permission denied. If I take the noexec flag off yarn works flawlessly.

So the question is, how do I get around this behaviour in Yarn so that I don't have to break best practice on the /tmp folder? I have dug hard into yarn's configuration options but there appears to be nothing in this area.

yarn-workspaces permission-denied ubuntu linux
1 Answers

Fortunately, Yarn is respecting standard TMPDIR variable. I'm guessing it is using standard NodeJS os.tmpdir() method which supports this.

Citing Wikipedia's page about TMPDIR:

TMPDIR is the canonical environment variable in Unix and POSIX that should be used to specify a temporary directory for scratch space. Most Unix programs will honor this setting and use its value to denote the scratch area for temporary files instead of the common default of /tmp or /var/tmp.

You can easily do something like:

mkdir ~/tmp && export TMPDIR=~/tmp && yarn install

Btw. I went through same deal, spending too much time chasing those weird permission denied errors and forgetting, that it is executed in /tmp. It would be amazing if Yarn would detect this automatically.

user_2591870
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