Can I change the user's home directory?

Scenario

Can I change the users home directory?

There is no turn-key way to adjust the container user's profile directory. Although admins have full control over the end-user's container image and can build one that uses a different path, Kasm Support advises against this. Kasm containers assume the directories /home/kasm-user and /home/kasm-default-profile are exist and are read-writable for the container provisioning process. Additionally the local user in the container is always assumed to be “kasm-user”.

Solution

It is not recommended to change the user’s profile directory.

As an alternative consider using:

Persistent Profile with either S3 or NFS storage (Persistent Profiles — Kasm 1.16.1 documentation )
Storage Mapping (Storage Mappings — Kasm 1.16.1 documentation )
File Mapping (File Mappings — Kasm 1.16.1 documentation )

If you must modify the kasm-user settings, there is a group setting named expose_user_environment_vars, When set to true, “KASM_USER" and “KASM_USER_ID“ will be exposed as environment variables in the container sessions. Then use the Docker Run Config override to change environment settings based around the kasm-user.

Taking it a step beyond, admins might want to make other customizations using those variables at session startup which are best accomplished by using startup scripts via File Mapping. One easy way to do that is to leverage the File Mapping feature to Run a Script As Root when the container session starts.

For Example, this short example script modifies /etc/passwd assuming you've enabled expose_user_environment_vars to ensure the KASM_USER environment variable is present . I'm not totally sure of the implications and stability of this so use at your own risk, but its an example you can start from. For example I don't thing the @ is posix compliant so you may want to parse that

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -ex
sed -i "s/kasm-user/$KASM_USER/g" /etc/passwd

Impacted Versions:

1.14.0

Resolved Versions:

None

Related Docs:

None