Permission denied on startup

[wischi-chr]

I used the bug template, because I originally intended to open a bug, but technically it's (likely) not a gitui bug.

Describe the bug
I get Error: Permission denied (os error 13) when I run gitui (doesn't matter if inside or outside a git repo, git cli works though).

⚠️ FYI my "setup" is a bit atypical

I'm trying to run gitui inside a ttyd terminal inside a custom docker container based on linuxserver/code-server. While all other binaries/things seems to work gitui doesn't. gitui --help is running fine, but when I try to start it (by calling gitui) I get the permission error.

I'm pretty sure that the docker image is not the issue because gitui runs fine when started inside the code-server (vscode) terminal. It also runs fine locally (without my reverse proxy for https and auth) inside ttyd, so I'm pretty much out of ideas how to find the issue.

My guess is that gitui tries/does something during startup and fails, but I can't figure out what because I just get said permission error but not what the operation was that gitui tried to execute.

Maybe some of the maintainers or people that know the source well could give me a hint.

To Reproduce
Haven't found a way to reproduce it yet - at least not without setting up a lot stuff in docker

Expected behavior
When I run gitui it starts, and if it can't for whatever reason to describe what exactly failed (not just "permission denied").

Context

• Running inside a custom docker container based on linuxserver/code-server
• gitui 0.27.0 2025-01-14 (99f6967)

[wischi-chr]

OK I'm an idiot, I found it.

I straced it and saw that gitui tried to open the home directory to get the config and create it but the home directory wasn't properly accessible by the user inside the container, so gitui failed to access it. Inside vscode the home directory was different (long story) that's why it worked there.

Should I create a bug for a better error message if the home directory isn't writeable or is that out of scope?

[extrawurst]

sure a better diagnostics would not hurt

[wischi-chr]

I opened a feature request here #2683. It's probably a good first issue and low priority but I can't set labels myself.