[MESOS-6340] Set HOME for Mesos tasks

• Type: Bug
• Status: Accepted
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: agent, containerization
• Labels: containerizer
• Epic Link: Environment Variables
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Cody Maloney
• Created: 07/Oct/16 22:47
• Updated: 07/Oct/18 13:02

Description

Quite a few programs assume $HOME points to a user-editable data file directory.

One example is PYTHON, which tries to look up $HOME to find user-installed pacakges, and if that fails it tries to look up the user in the passwd database which often goes badly (The container is running under the `nobody` user):

    if i == 1:
        if 'HOME' not in os.environ:
            import pwd
            userhome = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid()).pw_dir
        else:
            userhome = os.environ['HOME']

Just setting HOME by default to WORK_DIR would enable more software to work correctly out of the box. Software which needs to specialize / change it (or schedulers with specific preferences), should still be able to set it arbitrarily and anything a scheduler explicitly sets should overwrite the default value of $WORK_DIR