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From my research, I seem to notice that all package managers insist on being used as a privileged user and must be installed into /.

Typically, what I like to do is create a throwaway account, compile some software, and install to $HOME for that account. I can try a variety of setups and then when I'm done, just destroy the account.

However, compiling software becomes tedious.

My experience is really just limited to yum, but I don't understand why I wouldn't be able to drop a repo file into ~/etc/yum.repos.d and have yum install everything into a home account.

Is there any reason why package managers must be used as a privleged user to install software?

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Binary packages are compiled with the assumption that they will be installed to specific locations in /. This is not always easily changed, and it would take additional QA effort (which is difficult enough in the first place!) to determine whether specific binaries are or aren't relocatable.

To an extent, you can use things like fakechroot to create an entire system in a subdirectory as a non-root user, but this is tedious and fragile.

You will have better luck with source packages. Gentoo Prefix and Rootless GoboLinux are both package managers that can install to non-/ locations and may be usable by non-root users.

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    I'd add that there are 2 kinds of relocatability. Package may assume it is always in certain place or other things are in certain places (like /bin) or it may assume that it is installed in place specified by --prefix. While the latter may be work around by those projects the former requires patches on source code.
    – Maciej Piechotka
    Jan 8, 2011 at 14:42
  • Another option a la Gentoo Prefix, Rootless, and Nix is pkgsrc. It comes from NetBSD but works on a variety of platforms.
    – Michael Ekstrand
    Jun 2, 2012 at 16:36
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    Binary packages are compiled with the assumption that they will be installed to specific locations in / This sounds like a requirement which could be justified maybe 30 years ago but not now. Isn't for example the env program meant to solve this kind of problems? If not it's easy to come out with a scheme to configure any binary to look for other binaries in specific locations.
    – Piotr Dobrogost
    Feb 26, 2013 at 20:58
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    @PiotrDobrogost to some extend yes, to some extend no. For example there is no environment variable for /etc or (according to my knowledge) /usr/lib/<packagename>/ or /usr/libexec/<packagename>/. /usr/share can be changed by XDG variables which has been released sometime in this century and are not necessarily adopted for older programs.
    – Maciej Piechotka
    Aug 28, 2015 at 8:02
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There's a package manager project--Nix--with an interesting foundational idea (a "functional" pkg manager), which also supports a per-user operation:

Multi-user support

Starting at version 0.11, Nix has multi-user support. This means that non-privileged users can securely install software. Each user can have a different profile, a set of packages in the Nix store that appear in the user’s PATH. If a user installs a package that another user has already installed previously, the package won’t be built or downloaded a second time. At the same time, it is not possible for one user to inject a Trojan horse into a package that might be used by another user.

A NOTE I WANT TO ADD: Nix ought to be usable in a Unix-like system of your choice (e.g., a Linux distro).

There are also an associated large collection of packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager--Nixpkgs--built for a number of platforms:

  • GNU/Linux on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 (i686-linux and x86_64-linux)
  • Mac OS X (i686-darwin and x86_64-darwin)
  • FreeBSD (i686-freebsd and x86_64-freebsd)
  • OpenBSD (i686-openbsd)
  • Windows / Cygwin (i686-cygwin),

and an associated distro--NixOS:

NixOS is a Linux distribution based on Nix. It uses Nix not just for package management but also to manage the system configuration (e.g., to build configuration files in /etc). This means, among other things, that it’s possible to easily roll back the entire configuration of the system to an earlier state. Also, users can install software without root privileges. Read more…

and an associated "continuous" build system--Hydra.

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    Nice summary. Recently GNU Guix was announced. GNU package manager based on nix. savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=7436
    – Davorak
    Nov 29, 2012 at 1:10
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    @Davorak What are the diffetrences between nix and guix. As now I'm really using nix for my work, I want to know whether I could consider guix as another implementation of the tool I need. Can I read a summary of the differences somewhere? Perhaps, you could even write an answer with such a summary here, announcing one more alternative solution?
    – imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev
    Mar 19, 2015 at 15:51
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    to install nix you need sudo privileges
    – Rainb
    Jun 26, 2020 at 8:47
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I use JuNest which basically allows to have a really tiny linux distribution (containing just the package manager) inside your $HOME/.junest directory.

It allows to have your custom system inside the home directory accessible via proot and, therefore, you can install any packages without root privileges. It will run properly to all the major linux distributions, the only limitation is that JuNest can run on linux kernel with minimum recommended version 2.6.32.

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  • you forgot to mention that really tiny distribution is basically archlinux
    – Rainb
    Jun 26, 2020 at 10:08
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First of all it is due to dependencies. Some packages may not be installed by user - like PolicyKit. Therefore it would require additional burden on packager who donate their free time and usually installing program is as easy as typing sudo (single-user station) or nagging administrator.

There are options for installing in $HOME

  • Language primitive 'package managers' usually supports it out of box (like gem for Ruby, cabal for Haskell, pip for Python) or with small tweaking
  • Good old ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sandbox --enable-cool-feature && make all install (or varitations like jhbuild).
  • There was program to install at $HOME few years ago. However I cannot find it - I guess nearly noone used it as they either installed them themselves or nag administrators.
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    I don't really see how this is a convincing argument. Just because a package doesn't work since it's not invoked as root doesn't mean that the idea is not feasible. It's expected that PolicyKit wouldn't work for this type of situation. There are plenty of other packages that can be installed without root privileges. I am aware of software package managers (Python's is EasyInstall), but those aren't globally applicable as yum or apt-get are. Does anyone know the name of the program that Maciej is referring to?
    – elmt
    Jan 8, 2011 at 3:24
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    @elmt: Possibly stow, which might interest you anyway (but it's a tool, not a package source).
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Jan 8, 2011 at 12:46
  • @Gilles: No - it had GUI and was meant to be 'simple'. I guess that current direction is more of synaptic/packagekit.
    – Maciej Piechotka
    Jan 8, 2011 at 14:11
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There's a new kid on the block: "JuNest (Jailed User NEST) - The Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distro without root access." @ https://github.com/fsquillace/junest Advantage is that it doesn't introduce a new kind of package format, so after a very easy install (minimum: ca. 320M), the complete Arch Linux repository (more than 13000 packages ATM) is at your fingertips.

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Another one with a rather different model is 0install. It's based on the idea that you don't really install packages, but merely run them from a global namespace which downloads, compiles if necessary, and caches the software you want to use.

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  • You do need sudo to install 0install
    – Rainb
    Jun 26, 2020 at 8:48
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If you're fine with compiling from source and resolving dependencies yourself, primarily wanting the package manager to handle deploy/undeploy/upgrade operations, you might want to take a look at GNU Stow or the somewhat improved XStow. With them, you stage the installation to a separate directory (typically under $PREFIX/stow) and then stow makes symlinks to the software from your real prefix. This makes it easy to then remove the software completely. I use it successfully to manage my custom-installed software at my university.

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My experience is really just limited to yum, but I don't understand why I wouldn't be able to drop a repo file into ~/etc/yum.repos.d and have yum install everything into a home account.

The mainstream Linux package managers view the world as a sysadmin would ... where the machine is a single entity. This allows you to get answers to questions like "what outstanding errata apply to system X" and "how do system X and system Y differ". This also allows yum to have "a history" which is usable, have rpmdb versions and do things like "yum --security update" etc.

There are some package managers, like zero-install, which try to view the world as a user would ... ie. what applications do I have access to.

You might think the later is a better model, but IMNSHO there is a reason you haven't heard of zero-install but have heard of yum.

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I'd suggest http://linuxbrew.sh/

It's basically a fork of brew for macOS and has precompiled binaries for usage...

Especially great for handling older gcc versions.

If you really want to install by hand, a useful guide is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

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The tools used by Slackware, specifically installpkg, can. From the man page:

--root /otherroot
       Install using a location other than / (the default) as the root of the 
       filesystem to install on. In the example given, use /otherroot instead.
       Setting the ROOT environment variable does the same thing.

However, I don't know of any of the better frontends that are able to do this (e.g. slapt-get, as far as I know, cannot do this). Theoretically, you should be able to alias installpkg to installpkg --root ~/Apps - however, I think that most frontends require root to run, which defeats the point.

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and a new one is zpkg, it is magic:

With zpkg you can install programs from other distributions into your system

zpkg will install programs to your home directory. Global installations are also supported (via -g).

then you can install any package from : alpine, centos, debian, fedora, gentoo, archlinux, ubuntu

https://zpkg.plash.io/

https://github.com/ihucos/zpkg

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Yum needs to write to the database, which is own by root. Because of this you can't use it as a normal user.

You could try to decompress rpm files (rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio -idmv) inside a directory of your choosing.

But when you will execute your program you will have to take care to modify LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to load the dependent libraries. Also this will not take care of any dependencies.

Example:

# mkdir new_root
# cd new_root
# wget ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pool/4/mirror/centos/6.7/os/x86_64/Packages/vim-enhanced-7.4.629-5.el6.x86_64.rpm
# rpm2cpio vim-enhanced-7.4.629-5.el6.x86_64.rpm | cpio -idmv
# ./usr/bin/vim -version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10, compiled Jul 24 2015 02:23:23)

The above doesn't have any dependent libraries, otherwise you would have to use something like:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./usr/lib ./usr/bin/program
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