Shared directory for mise installs

[jhulten]

I have a toolbox container that we populate with default version of our tools, but will also have user specified tools. The default tools are installed by the docker build process in /usr/local/share/mise/installs and an entrypoint.sh uses mise link to link them to the toolbox user home directory in ~/.local/share/mise/installs.

It would be beneficial for toolbox containers, bastion hosts, etc to have a hierarchy of install folders to fall back on. The users active install directory should remain $MISE_DATA_DIR/installs, but I propose an additional parameter. Something like global_install_path or global_install_paths depending on if the setting takes a path or a list of paths.

The most obvious path I see is that mise x and its cohort would first look in ~/.local/share/mise/installs, followed by the one or more directories in global_install_paths.

Related #2366

[jhulten]

Alternate option: a setting that automatically links versions from a shared directory into $MISE_DATA_DIR/installs. This is how I fake it right now, but I expect things like latest will potentially fail over time.

[gregbrowndev]

@jhulten I think you should already be able to do this with mise's configuration hierarchy:

/
├── etc/mise/                         # System-wide config (highest precedence)
│   ├── conf.d/*.toml                 # System fragments, loaded alphabetically
│   ├── config.toml                   # System defaults
│   └── config.<env>.toml             # Env-specific system config (MISE_ENV or -E)
└── home/user/
    ├── .config/mise/
    │   ├── conf.d/*.toml             # User fragments, loaded alphabetically
    │   ├── config.toml               # Global user config
    │   ├── config.<env>.toml         # Env-specific user config
    │   ├── config.local.toml         # User-local overrides
    │   └── config.<env>.local.toml   # Env-specific user-local overrides
    └── work/
        ├── mise.toml                 # Work-wide settings
        └── myproject/
            ├── mise.local.toml       # Local overrides (git-ignored)
            ├── mise.toml             # Project config
            ├── mise.<env>.toml       # Env-specific project config
            ├── mise.<env>.local.toml # Env-specific project local overrides
            └── backend/
                └── mise.toml         # Service-specific config (lowest precedence)

I'm not sure whether that /etc/mise/* directory can also contain mise.toml files (containing tools) or just mise settings, though.

Otherwise, it looks like the easiest approach would be to make sure the mise.toml from the toolbox container (assuming you're installing those tools with mise) is in an ancestor directory of your final container's user directory. Maybe some changes are necessary.

If you can arrange the mise.toml files into a hierarchy, it should be able to find tools from both configs, you can run mise doctor and see the config files being used:

config_files:
  ~/.config/mise/config.toml
  ~/Development/helm-charts/mise.toml

Going back to my first suggestion, if those "system default" config files can actual contain tools/tasks, then you might be able to use the system_config_file setting in your downstream mise.toml to point the mise.toml from the toolbox container, e.g. /usr/local/mise.toml, by default it points to /etc/mise/config.toml

[jhulten]

I currently have a /etc/mise/config.toml and a $USER/.config/mise/config.toml and that part works fine. In my "toolbox image" use case, I set MISE_DATA_DIR to /usr/local/share/mise and the first install of tools puts them there just fine.

If I do not set that environment variable, the build puts tools in /root/.local/share/mise which doesn't let my final user get to them. This is why I set /usr/local before that first mise install.

The problem is that there is no way except linking to inform mise that those tools exist there. If the toolbox user runs mise install again, the tools section in /etc results in fresh installs in ~/.local/share/mise/installs.

Ideally I would like to have a shared install directory that is used as a fallback location before downloading a tool again.

[gregbrowndev]

Might be a silly question, but have you/shouldn't you set MISE_DATA_DIR to /usr/local/share/mise in the final user environment too?

I would expect MISE_DATA_DIR to be a global setting that should be kept the same across the layers in your image, not customised for each layer. Maybe there is another setting for that if you definitely needed that?

E.g. I can see multiple versions of installed tools stored within the MISE_DATA_DIR, some from my root config.toml and some from other unrelated projects:

ls ~/.local/share/mise/installs/1password/
# 2      2.32   2.32.1 latest

[jhulten]

That is one possibility, but if multiple users run mise install with a shared directory, we get some serious permission shenanigans. I don't want a user to install as root once and have a latest symlink that the regular user cannot move.

[uthark]

I have slightly different but similar use-case. on CI I want to build base image which is used by build runners. It provides some basic tooling. but in the user repos they may have extra tools to be installed. To speedup build process we could use github action cache, but when it mounts, it will "override" (I guess it uses bind mount) existing installation cache, so tooling from base are not available.
So it would be nice to be able to specify multiple MISE_DATA_DIR folders where tools could be looked up. If I'm missing something and there's a better solution, I'll be glad to hear, thanks!

[jdx]

I'm very +1 on this idea. I've ran into it myself with devcontainers where I want to mount a user directory that can't have anything inside of it from the Dockerfile since it's a mount but still want some software to be preinstalled. I use /opt/mise but then permission issues are frequent.

I think there is some precedent here we can fall back on with how we approach global vs system config (~/.config vs /etc/mise) where we could instead use /var/mise and /etc/mise—or maybe /opt/mise would be more idiomatic? not sure.

That said, I don't think this will be a simple change at all. There are probably countless places we look this directory up and I'm certain we rely on the fact there is only 1 directory in many, many places. It will probably need to be experimental for a long time.

[jdx]

actually I think it should be /usr/local/share/mise

[jdx]

Working on this in #8581.

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