How can I use snap when I don't use /home/$USER?

snapd
2

These days two things need to happen:

  1. the snaps need to be able to write to your home
  2. snap-confine needs to be able to perform mounts

For ‘1’, you can use the dpkg-reconfigure method or simply drop a file into /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d. Eg, create /etc/apparmor.d/tunables/home.d/my-homes:

# set to parent directory of your user's directories. Eg, if user's dir is /foo/bar/USER,
# set this to /foo/bar/
@{HOMEDIRS}+=/foo/bar/

Once you’ve done that, reload all the profiles with this:

$ sudo apparmor_parser -r /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/profiles/*

For ‘2’, with a recent stable core image, you can add apparmor rules to /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/snap-confine. Eg, create /var/lib/snapd/apparmor/snap-confine/my-homes with:

# home directories are in /foo/bar, not /home
mount options=(rw rbind) /foo/bar/ -> /tmp/snap.rootfs_*/home/,

Then reload the snap-confine policy with:

$ sudo apparmor_parser -r /etc/apparmor.d/*snap-confine*

These settings will be remembered after this. The snap-confine directory was implemented recently for NFS home and it is planned that snapd will use this to handle alternate homes too.

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