Best Practices: creating alternate user account to use MacPorts in?

[Dave Allured - NOAA Affiliate]

Nick, I am glad you figured out before I had to type too much.   ;-)

Please refer to:
https://guide.macports.org/#installing.macports.source.multiple (section
2.2.4) and observe several rules.  In particular it looks like you are
still missing *--with-applications-dir=XXX* and*--without-startupitems*.

Also on my controlled Mac where I do not have any admin privileges, I do
not use *--with-install-user* or *--with-install-group*.  I simply run
configure while logged in as the desired user and group.


On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 5:11 PM Nick <atod101101 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Found the issue, my PATH was pointing to an older macports binary which
> used different macports.conf!  No help required now.
>
> On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 6:57 PM Nick <atod101101 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My proposal here is to create a new user account for macports and
>> development work.  Logged into this account 'mp0' I tried:
>>
>> ./configure --with-no-root-privileges --prefix=${HOME]/mp-install
>> --with-install-user=mp0 --with-install-group=mp0
>> make
>> make install
>>
>> However, now when I try to install a port I get an error that macports
>> has insufficient privileges to write to the install directory.  I can touch
>> files in this directory without any error.
>>
>> Does anyone have suggestions on resolving this?
>>
>> I created the account using dscl, not sure if there is something that I
>> should be aware of doing this.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 5:16 PM Nick <atod101101 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> What are best practices in sandboxing MacPorts to a non-admin user
>>> account and still retaining the ability to use XQuartz?
>>>
>>> For instance, I would like to invoke all applications as a certain user,
>>> without administrative privileges, however at the same time still be able
>>> to use XQuartz graphically from my privileged account. I was hoping XQuartz
>>> could be installed specific to this non-admin user as well.  Unsure if such
>>> isolation is possible.
>>>
>>> I'm doing some sandbox testing.  I see a 'macports' user, however in my
>>> first installation many of the files in /opt/local are owned by root.  I
>>> was hoping to install a specific to a user account for all MacPorts.
>>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.macports.org/pipermail/macports-users/attachments/20250702/aac20fbb/attachment.htm>