nvm: command not found

[ryanpcmcquen]

I've just installed Chromebrew on a fresh machine and ran crew install nvm. Even after opening a new shell, the nvm command is not found. Is this the expected behavior?

[uberhacker]

@ryanpcmcquen: Try exiting the shell and then log back in. I'm guessing ~/.bashrc wasn't sourced and was causing the nvm command not to execute.

[ryanpcmcquen]

Nope. The fix was setting NVM_DIR="/usr/local/.nvm", then running /usr/local/share/nvm/install.sh.

[ryanpcmcquen]

The install should have a hook to run that script, with the correct NVM_DIR, because the default is $HOME which will not have the correct write permissions.

[uberhacker]

Just out of curiosity, what is the output of your ~/.bashrc?

[ryanpcmcquen]

# /etc/skel/.bashrc
#
# This file is sourced by all *interactive* bash shells on startup,
# including some apparently interactive shells such as scp and rcp
# that can't tolerate any output.  So make sure this doesn't display
# anything or bad things will happen !


# Test for an interactive shell.  There is no need to set anything
# past this point for scp and rcp, and it's important to refrain from
# outputting anything in those cases.
if [[ $- != *i* ]] ; then
        # Shell is non-interactive.  Be done now!
        return
fi


# Put your fun stuff here.

export NVM_DIR="/usr/local/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"  # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"  # This loads nvm bash_completion

cd ~/Downloads/

[mjackson]

Thanks for the fix, @ryanpcmcquen. Worked well for me.

Do you know why $HOME doesn't have the correct write permissions? Seems weird that chronos isn't able to write stuff to /home/chronos/user.

[ryanpcmcquen]

@mjackson, I think that is a Google thing (in other words, outside of Chromebrew's control), but I bet @jam7 would know more.

[mjackson]

Just found this gem in a crouton issue:

sudo mount -i -o remount,exec /home/chronos/user

Looks like $HOME doesn't have exec by default, but adding that line to ~/.bashrc fixes it.

[ryanpcmcquen]

@uberhacker, @cstrouse, @jam7, and @skycocker, what do you think about rolling that into the Chromebrew ~/.bashrc (#1342 (comment)).

[uberhacker]

Hey @ryanpcmcquen: I have mixed feelings. I'm not a big fan of installing anything package related in the home directory. I know a lot of GitHub projects do it this way, including nvm, but IMHO I don't think it's the most elegant approach in Chrome OS. It looks like this package needs reworked to install correctly in /usr/local/share/nvm instead of ~/.nvm. Since /usr/local is already mounted exec and the chronos user has write access, I believe that is the more appropriate location. I'm completely open to what others have to say about this issue, however.

[mjackson]

IMO $HOME should have exec by default, just because so much stuff relies on it. nvm and yarn are 2 that come to mind. Adding that line to my ~/.bashrc has fixed a bunch of issues for me.

[uberhacker]

The issue here appears to be the binary is corrupt. If you install via crew install nvm -s, that works fine. We'll need to fix the binary in the future.

[minektur]

I think we ought to document, and tell users to make sure to add /usr/local/bin to their path, but I do not think we should be in the business of modifying people's PATH by default. I'm also somewhat philosophically opposed to remounting ~ with execute perms... My main reasoning is that I like to keep my chromebook as close to what is delivered by google as possible - the less modifications we have to make to get things running the better. I can see why having +x on ~ would be nice, and have occasionally been inconvenienced by it. Now I have just gotten used to making myself a /usr/local/fred directory that I do all my normal work/development in... not idea, but I prefer that over removing yet another protection that chromeos has. That is the other benefit of not changing the mount options. It is done as an extra layer of security feature for normal chromeos usage - my making the place where things get downloaded by the browser -x, it removes a whole class of exploits. Similarly, I go out of my way not to disable the secure boot loader etc.

You can read about the security design of chromeos here:

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

In particular, having the root partion be readonly, and having user home directories be -x is a designe feature I'd like to keep.

All that said, I woudn't be against giving people the option, but I'd be leary of making it an automatic default.

[ryanpcmcquen]

Is the binary fixed?

[uberhacker]

@ryanpcmcquen: We don't have binaries now for this package. It's probably wise to keep it that way. Do you have any problems with the current release?

[ryanpcmcquen]

No, I just wanted to verify it was fixed. Thank you!