root was already refused as an answer, but only the refusal said so — and only
after somebody typed it. The advice now comes with the question, along with why:
no safety net, a typo in a path that deletes instead of refusing, and nothing to
distinguish you from a process that got out of hand.
An extra warning when SUDO_USER is unset. That means the script was started as
root rather than through sudo, which usually means root is how they log in — the
exact situation the general advice is about, and the one where general advice is
easiest to assume is aimed at somebody else. It says so plainly instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The user account section is now the first thing that acts, ahead of disk space.
The reason is a real defect, not tidiness. If the account does not exist yet,
USER_HOME is a path that is not there — and the ballast offers to put its file in
it, where ballast_create's `mkdir -p` runs as root and creates /home/<name> owned
by root:root. adduser afterwards finds the directory already present and does not
populate or chown it, so the account ends up with a home it cannot write to.
Making the account before any step can write into its home removes the ordering
entirely.
USER_HOME is re-read from getent after adduser runs. Until that point it is the
/home/<name> guess, because there is nothing to look up; adduser is free to have
used something else and every later step writes there.
Found while testing that, and worse than the thing it was testing:
local user="$1" dest="/etc/sudoers.d/99-${user}-nopasswd"
bash expands ${user} before the assignment to user has happened, so dest came out
as /etc/sudoers.d/99--nopasswd with the name missing. The rule inside was correct,
which is what made it invisible — visudo passes, sudo works, and the account
really does get passwordless sudo. What breaks is everything around it: every
account granted this way writes to that same file, so a second grant silently
overwrites the first and revokes it; and has_passwordless_sudo looks for
99-<user>-nopasswd, never finds it, and re-grants on every run forever.
Split into separate declarations, with the reason recorded where it happened, and
an empty username is now refused outright. Scanned the other lib files for the
same shape — the remaining multi-assignment locals only read positional
parameters, which is safe.
The stray /etc/sudoers.d/99--nopasswd this created on the dev box during testing
has been removed and visudo -c re-verified.
Verified with a real throwaway account: correctly reports not-granted before,
writes 99-msdemo-nopasswd as root:root 0440 with the right rule, reports granted
after, and leaves sudoers valid.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three changes to the question at the top of the run.
USER_HOME is looked up rather than assumed. The original built "/home/$USERNAME",
which is only the usual answer — an account created with a different home, or one
whose home was moved, had every later step writing to a directory that was not
theirs. getent passwd knows; the /home guess remains only as the fallback for an
account that does not exist yet, where there is nothing to look up.
The default is now whoever invoked sudo. On a re-run, or on a machine that is
already somebody's, that is the answer every time, and retyping it is a chance to
typo it into creating a second account. root invoking the script directly offers
no default, since root is never the account being set up — and is refused if
typed.
The name is validated against the portable shape of a Linux account name before
anything else happens. Letting adduser refuse it later means several questions
have already been answered against a name that was never going to work.
It also no longer goes through prompt_value, which obeys any environment variable
matching the name it is filling in. USERNAME is set by some login environments,
and a variable this script silently takes as an answer should not be one that
might already be set for unrelated reasons. SETUP_USERNAME is the explicit
override.
The tmux config write moved out of the user section entirely. It was there only
because the original copied it right after adduser, where $USER_HOME first
exists. It is a dotfile and belongs with .zshrc and the starship config in the
shell section.
Verified: defaults to the sudo invoker, resolves daemon's home to /usr/sbin
rather than /home/daemon, falls back to /home for an account that does not exist,
and rejects a name with a space, a leading digit, one over 32 characters, and
root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two real defects fixed on the way across.
The sudoers write was in the wrong order. The original echoed the rule straight
into /etc/sudoers.d, validated it afterwards, and chmod'd it later still. A
malformed file there breaks sudo COMPLETELY — and you cannot sudo to repair it,
so on a remote machine that is a rescue console — and so does one with loose
permissions, because sudo refuses to read its own configuration. Both of those
windows were live in the original ordering. grant_passwordless_sudo now writes a
temp file, runs visudo -c against it, and only then places it with install(1),
which applies the content and the 0440 mode in one step. Nothing reaches
/etc/sudoers.d that has not already been validated.
The .tmux.conf copy overwrote whatever was in the home on every run. lib/files.sh
adds the two shapes that stop this whole class of thing:
install_config installs when absent, does nothing when identical, and keeps
what the user wrote when it differs — printing the cp to take
ours, so the choice stays theirs
append_once wraps a block in named markers so a second run recognises its
own work; also lets a human see which lines came from this
script and remove them as a unit
append_once is what the five unguarded `cat >>` into .zshrc need when those
sections are ported — a second pass currently duplicates the starship init, the
nvim PATH, bun, deno and the aliases.
Passwordless sudo is asked separately from creating the account, because it is a
security posture rather than part of making a user, and the cost is stated: a key
that can log into this account is root without a further step. Officer's actual
requirement is stated too — os-user-shell.ts runs `sudo -n`, and a prompt it
cannot answer surfaces as a permissions error rather than a question — and
refusing records that consequence in the summary instead of a bare "skipped".
Verified: all three install_config outcomes, append_once writing exactly once
across two runs, visudo rejecting junk before anything is installed, and the
section reporting correctly against this host's existing account.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
OFFICER_ROOT, defaulting to <user home>/officerdev. One directory holding the
four things Officer is made of, per docs/sidecar-app-store.md — the app, its
data, the item store, and any containers the app store provisions — so the whole
installation can be moved, backed up or deleted as a unit.
Asked at the start with the other questions rather than at the point it is first
needed. It decides the shape of several later steps: where the repository is
cloned, where DATA_PATH sits beside it, and which filesystem the app store's
bind mounts come out of. Asking once up front also means the run can be described
before it starts rather than discovered as it goes.
A leading ~ is expanded explicitly. It arrives as a literal from a read or an
environment variable — nothing expands it there — and would otherwise create a
directory actually named "~" in whatever the working directory happened to be.
Relative paths are refused with the value named, and a trailing slash is trimmed
so the path composes cleanly with what gets appended to it.
Nothing creates the directory yet; that belongs to officer-setup. This records
the answer and reports it, including whether it already exists.
Verified: Enter takes the default, ~ expands, trailing slash trims, OFFICER_ROOT
in the environment skips the prompt, and a relative path fails with the value
named.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three sections where there were two, and none of them touches the machine until
you say so:
2. System update upgrades what is already installed
3. Core utils what the distribution provides
4. Command-line tools lazydocker, lazygit, starship, fastfetch
The split matters because these are different kinds of change and deserve
separate answers. System update is the only step in the whole script that moves
versions of software already on the machine; core utils only ever adds what is
absent; and the four tools are upstream binaries the distribution does not ship
at all. Previously the update and the core packages were one step and the tools
were tacked onto the end of it, so agreeing to "essentials" meant agreeing to all
three at once.
Every section now prints what it will install and what it is leaving alone, then
asks. Enter means yes — unlike the machine-role question, which has no default,
because these are "do the thing you already asked for" and making twenty of them
require a deliberate keystroke would train people to hold the y key down.
ASSUME_YES=1 answers all of them for an unattended run, and EOF fails with that
named rather than spinning.
Refusing is recorded rather than glossed: LAST_SKIPPED feeds the summary, so a
declined section reads "Core utils: SKIPPED by request — cowsay neofetch" instead
of quietly reporting nothing installed.
Nothing to install means no prompt at all — there is nothing to agree to.
announce_plan takes the array NAMES rather than their contents, because once a
list has been through word splitting an empty one cannot be told from a missing
one.
Verified all three paths: accept, refuse, and nothing-to-do.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
No default, and it is the only question in the script like that. A guessed
default is right often enough to be trusted and wrong in exactly the case that
costs the most — pinning a static IP on a rented box, or leaving the firewall
open on one. Every branch downstream is about what this machine is exposed to,
so it is worth one deliberate keystroke rather than an Enter.
Empty and unrecognised answers re-ask rather than aborting; a failed read means
EOF rather than a wrong answer, and fails with the environment variable named,
because otherwise the loop spins forever the first time this runs unattended.
Drops guess_machine_role, which existed only to supply that default. default_iface
stays — the static IP section needs it when it is ported.
MACHINE_ROLE in the environment still answers it ahead of time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
MACHINE_ROLE is homelab, vps or dev, and several steps have a different right
answer per role with no way to work it out themselves: whether the address is
yours to pin (static IP), whether the box faces the open internet (fail2ban, SSH
hardening, UFW), and whether it is allowed to sleep (suspend, logind).
Asked in pre-flight rather than at each point of use. The steps that care run
from swap through to the firewall, and being asked "is this a VPS?" for the
fourth time halfway down a provisioning run is how people start answering
without reading.
The default offered is guessed from whether this machine's own address is in
RFC1918 space, which beats asking whether it is virtualised — a homelab is very
often a VM on Proxmox and would be misread as rented — and is the same fact most
of the branches turn on anyway. A graphical session means dev; so does macOS.
It is only ever a suggestion the user confirms.
MACHINE_ROLE in the environment answers it ahead of time for an unattended run,
which is why it is declared with :- rather than a plain assignment. The first
version wiped the caller's value before ask_machine_role ever saw it; caught by
running with MACHINE_ROLE=vps and watching the menu appear anyway.
Verified: guesses vps on this host (public IPv4, no DISPLAY, no display
manager), env override takes, and a bad value fails with the three valid ones
named. Nothing consumes the role yet — the steps get wired as each is worked
through.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Structure before the work rather than during it: scripts/machine-setup.sh becomes
scripts/setup/machine-setup/, with the script itself as the entry point and
lib/base.sh holding what every part of it needs.
machine-setup.sh pre-flight and the numbered sections, for now
lib/base.sh shared state, output, the step/resume machine, prompts,
and OS detection
The rule for lib/ is definitions only — nothing there installs, writes or
restarts anything, so sourcing it is safe from anywhere. That is why the ERR
trap stayed in the entry point: a trap is a side effect on whoever sources it.
Behaviour is unchanged. Verified by diffing the moved region against the previous
commit: identical set of functions, and the only differences are added comments,
section banners, fail() reformatted onto three lines, and one new line — a guard
against double-sourcing, which matters because steps will source this directly
once they move out, and a second pass would reset SUMMARY.
The sections are still one 1111-line block below pre-flight; they move into
steps/ as each is worked through. The script also still reads ssh-keys.zip,
.tmux.conf and ufw-docker-rules.conf from SCRIPT_DIR, which is now this
directory, so those three steps warn and skip until the files follow it here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5