Setup a general writable folder for modules

[shyim]

When writing a module it would be nice to have a place where all services writes their data to. Currently, the Redis service has an issue as by default the user cannot write to /var/lib/redis (https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/services/redis/default.nix#L26) or in postgres /var/lib/postgres (https://github.com/LnL7/nix-darwin/blob/master/modules/services/postgresql/default.nix#L59)

I guess a generic folder like in homebrew /opt/homebrew writeable by the user can solve this issue. I am the only one with this issue? 😅

[reckenrode]

Setting dataDir in the module configuration to a path writeable by your user should work. Ideally, these would be more like the NixOS modules, which set up system services and create users specific to each (redis, postgres).

[shyim]

when we create users we would have also a writeable folder 🤔

[reckenrode]

It will if you specify createHome. I tried setting this up to test, and it was pretty messy. I had to copy the launch agent to /Library/LaunchDaemons and run it using sudo so it could switch to the redis user. That ended up being a lot less user-friendly than I expected. 😕

Instead of a shared folder all modules could use (because that seems risky), something like systemd.tmpfiles.rules from NixOS would be nice. You could set it up to create a directory for your service and have it set the owner and permissions to whatever you wanted.

[LnL7]

Yeah, there's currently no functionality to setup files/directories for services. Logfiles have a similar problem where launchd will completely refuse to start the service, so you have to either setup /var/log yourself or use a shared folder like /tmp which isn't really the proper place.