An alarming number of people have noticed, the pacman-4.2 release removed the --asroot option from makepkg. This means that you can no longer build packages as the root user. There are good reasons for this and the option was only included due to issue we had building under fakeroot (only the package() function gets fun under fakeroot these days, and there has been no issues with fakeroot in a while anyway).

Even if your PKGBUILD file is not malicious, there are good examples of when something goes wrong by accident. Remember the bumblebee bug that deleted /usr due to an extra space? Or just this week a steam bug that deletes a user home directory? Do you still want to run code as root? OK then… I am going to show you how not to!

Firstly, we need a build directory. I suggest /home/build. Putting this directory directly under /root will not work unless you want to relax its 700 permissions to allow the nobody user read/write access¹. I suppose you could as you are running as root… but I will use /home/build. Create the directory and set permissions with the following:

mkdir /home/build
chgrp nobody /home/build
chmod g+ws /home/build
setfacl -m u::rwx,g::rwx /home/build
setfacl -d --set u::rwx,g::rwx,o::- /home/build


Not that people running makepkg as root need to know what code is doing to run it… I’ll explain what is happening here. Firstly create a /home/build directory, make it owned by the nobody group and ensure that group has write permissions. Also add the sticky flag to the group permissions so all files created in that directory also are owned by the nobody group. Then we set ACLs to ensure all files and directories created in /home/build have group read/write permissions.

Now to building you package! Get you PKGBUILD in your new build directory and run makepkg as the nobody user. You can do this using su but using sudo has the advantage of being able to alias this command. Installing sudo does not create a security risk as you are running as root! You also do not need to configure anything as root will have full sudo permissions by default². Build your package using:

sudo -u nobody makepkg

Done… I’d add “alias makepkg='sudo -u nobody makepkg” to your ~/.bashrc so you never have to type this again.

There is still a problem here. If you download and manually extract a package sourceball, or use an AUR helper such as cower to do so, the group write permissions get lost:

[root@arya build]# cower -d pacman-git
:: pacman-git downloaded to /home/build
 
[root@arya build]# ls -ld pacman-git/
drwxr-xr-x+ 2 root nobody 4096 Mar 21 2013 pacman-git/


Doing “chmod -R g+w pacman-git/” will fix this. There is probably a way to avoid this – at least when manually extracting the tarball, but I have no interest in figuring it out. Otherwise, it is a two line function.

And if this does not satisfy you, revert that patch that removed --asroot. It should still revert cleanly.

¹ makepkg checks directory write permissions using the full path so fails if any parent directories are not writable. I guess this could be fixed if someone was interested.

² Note that to have makepkg install missing dependencies and install your built package without being queried the password for the nobody user (which would be difficult to answer…), you will need to configure nobody to run sudo pacman without a password.