Consider making $HOME = /app about lifecycle HOT 6 CLOSED

In the heroku/pack:18 image used by the heroku/buildpacks builder image, there is a symlink from /app to /workspace, and /workspace is the HOME. We build our run-image with:

RUN ln -s /workspace /app

RUN useradd -u ${pack_uid} -g ${pack_gid} -ms /bin/bash -d /workspace heroku

(note: the Heroku builds never happened in /app so we don't need it in the build image)

This works pretty well with all the Heroku buildpacks that use the cnb-shim.

I think this approach is good: accommodate it in the stack image. I would like to move away from /app because we often hear from users that they aren't building an "app" (it's a "service" or something).

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that said, i think setting HOME as /workspace (or whatever is configured in place of /workspace) makes sense. But IIRC, there is some reason we can't introduce that to the spec.

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Where are you setting HOME to workspace in the Heroku images?

Setting HOME to /workspace during build seems risky to me. Tools often use dot-files in HOME to cache downloads (not necessary for launch) or store credentials (bad for security if they end up in the final image).

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@sclevine I'm only suggesting we set HOME to /workspace for the run-image

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I agree with @sclevine on this that given how many runtimes expose the root of the application (think exploded JAR/WAR files) that overlapping $HOME with the application directory is problematic. For reference the only CVE ever opened against the CF Java Buildpack was due to this very behavior ☹️

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Given the concerns @sclevine @nebhale have outlined and the lack of activity on this issue, I am going to go ahead and close it.

Feel free to reopen if you would like to restart the discussion.

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