handle missing $HOME / homedir() variable gracefully

[xiuliren]

Ubuntu 14.04, julia 0.4.5
I have a julia script, when I run it in a running aws instance, it works.
but when I tried to run it using user_data, which means running the script after system initialization, it failed.

I got the following output in /var/log/cloud-init-output.log. It seems that it is a problem of julia. Any help will be appreciated.

Base.InitError(mod=:Base, error=Base.KeyError(key="HOME"))
rec_backtrace at /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/libjulia.so (unknown line)
jl_throw at /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/libjulia.so (unknown line)
unknown function (ip: 0x7f0e54b75eca)
init_load_path at ./client.jl:302
__init__ at ./sysimg.jl:308
unknown function (ip: 0x7f0e54c04bb9)
jl_apply_generic at /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/libjulia.so (unknown line)
jl_module_run_initializer at /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/libjulia.so (unknown line)
unknown function (ip: 0x7f0e578d4713)
unknown function (ip: 0x7f0e578ccf2c)
julia_init at /usr/bin/../lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/julia/libjulia.so (unknown line)
unknown function (ip: 0x4016d3)
__libc_start_main at /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (unknown line)
unknown function (ip: 0x401725)
unknown function (ip: (nil))
2016-04-15 20:36:20,478 - util.py[WARNING]: Failed running /var/lib/cloud/instance/scripts/part-001 [1]
2016-04-15 20:36:20,480 - cc_scripts_user.py[WARNING]: Failed to run module scripts-user (scripts in /var/lib/cloud/instance/scripts)
2016-04-15 20:36:20,480 - util.py[WARNING]: Running scripts-user (<module 'cloudinit.config.cc_scripts_user' from '/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/cloudinit/config/cc_scripts_user.pyc'>) failed
Cloud-init v. 0.7.5 finished at Fri, 15 Apr 2016 20:36:20 +0000. Datasource DataSourceEc2.  Up 68.38 seconds

[tkelman]

The system doesn't have the environment variable HOME set. Either we could try to find everywhere in the codebase that references ENV["HOME"] and try to make it degrade more gracefully if !haskey(ENV, "HOME"), or for now as a workaround you could set HOME to something.

[xiuliren]

Tks, export HOME=/root works.

[davidanthoff]

I just ran into this. I believe there is only one place in the whole julia code base that references ENV["HOME"] here (there is also a Windows specific code like this, but it seems more robust already). So adding a graceful fallback there might be enough?

There are also some tests that seem to use ENV["HOME"]. But searching the whole julia codebase for "HOME" just returned 5 hits in total...

[tkelman]

The newer libuv we're now on should have a function we can use for this.

[grero]

I just ran into this as well while trying to launch htcondor jobs on Mac OS X 10.9.5.

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 0.5.0-rc4+0
Commit 9c76c3e (2016-09-09 01:43 UTC)
Platform Info:
  System: Darwin (x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0)
  CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X5472  @ 3.00GHz
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY Penryn)
  LAPACK: libopenblas64_
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-3.7.1 (ORCJIT, penny)

julia> Pkg.status()
1 required packages:
 - ClusterManagers               0.1.0

[NickMcNutt]

I also have this issue running Julia in some Docker containers (for instance phusion:baseimage-docker) since $HOME isn't set by default.

[tkelman]

I think this was fixed on master by #19636