Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Levitating 71 days ago
I've been using oh-my-pi, for the simple (and possibly naive/stubborn) reason that it doesn't try to get me to install it as global npm dependency in /usr.

I am not a web developer, I don't need npm and I don't want it clobbering my /usr (which is immutable on many modern distro's anyway). Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the project to me.

oh-my-pi's installer installs a bun bundled binary in my users .local folder. That's much more user-friendly.

4 comments

You can get npm to install into `~/.local`.

Put this into `~/.npmrc`:

```

prefix = ~/.local

```

Bam, `npm install -g` contstrained to your `~/.local`

They're friendly for the user audience that doesn't care about these things. The location is a minor issue compared to many of the capabilities they come with. For the slightly more tech savvy, they should really be running these harnesses in a contained environment with net cap dropped, for instance.
You can add that via an extension: https://github.com/carderne/pi-sandbox

The price of flexibility is, pi is not opinionated about adding sandboxing out-of-the-box, it gives you options on how you want to do it. You either do it with linux containers, with a dedicated VM, or just bubblewrap. It is nice that it gives you a way to hook into it in a very easy way though.

I use mise to install it in a manageadble way (and basically everything else on my computer).
pnpm installs to ~/.local as well