Do I need to be root to build step-cli?

[aaribaud]

Hello,
Following the developer docs (docs/local-development.md), I am hitting a problem: make bootstrap wants to install the golangci-lint binary in /bin/, which it obviously cannot do unless I were building as root, which I would have reservations about, to say the least.

Is this an issue with my setup, or does make Bootstrap really want to add an executable to the system's /bin/ directory? And if so, is there a reason why golangci-lint cannot simply be installed in ${HOME}/.local/bin/?

[aaribaud]

Answering myself: issue with my setup apparently. go env GOPATH returns the right value in my shell, but not in make.

[EDIT: unmarked as answer, because the issue might be with the documentation or makefiles of step-cli]

[aaribaud]

Right, so I double-checked. What I did is:

• Installed Debian 11 in a VM, with make, curl, git and golang available
• Verified that go is working by running a hello, world go program example
• Cloned step-cli as ~/go/src/github.com/smallstep/cli, as per the doc/local-development.md instructions
• Ran make bootstrap.
  The result is:

install: cannot create regular file '/bin/golangci-lint': Permission denied

Investigation shows that make/common.mk invokes $(go env GOPATH) and gets an empty string from it (whereas it gives the proper /home/user/go path when executed from shell or script) and prepends that empty string to "/bin/golangci-lint", accidentally resulting in a system path.

The problem seems to be that the makefile should invoke $$(go env GOPATH), with an escaped $, as this appears to be a bash construct, not a Make one. However, I guess if that were the issue, I would not be the only one having it, yet I found no other discussion about this.

Anyone have any idea?

[aaribaud]

Tested replacing $(go env GOPATH) with $$(go env GOPATH), make bootstrap now runs fine. Once I've run all tests suggested in doc/local-development.md, I'll submit a PR for this and see if anyone screams about it.

[maraino]

Yes, it should be $$, but I've responded in smallstep/cli#535, we might want to make sure that this will work on CI/CD.