Miniconda installer should check if $HOME is set

[wombatonfire]

Checklist

• I added a descriptive title
• I searched open reports and couldn't find a duplicate

What happened?

I hope this is the right repo to create an issue about the Miniconda installer (anaconda-issues repo doesn't seem appropriate). If not, please let me know where I should open it.

The Miniconda installer is using set -eu and unconditionally set the PREFIX="$HOME/miniconda3". The problem with this is that $HOME may not be set if the installer is executed in the non-login shell, in which case the installation fails with 29: HOME: parameter not set.

One of the deployment scenarios is to install Miniconda in the shared location (like /opt/miniconda3), so that all users can then use it to create private environments. In this scenario the PREFIX is specified explicitly, and $HOME is not used.

Unfortunately, the installer always expects it to be set, even when it's not needed, and that conflicts with the unattended deployment, like, for example, from the cloud-init script.

Obviously, it's not a big deal, and it's easy to export HOME=... before running the installer, but it would be good if it could check if $HOME is set before using it, and ignore if it's not, but the PREFIX is explicitly specified.

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Additional Context

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[travishathaway]

Hi @wombatonfire,

Thanks for filing this issue. I have transferred it to the "constructor" repository as this is the appropriate place to ask about installer related things.

[jaimergp]

Thanks for the report. I'll be fixing this on #678!