Notroot: install packages without being root

2016-01-10 #bash #system

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Sometime, you connect to a server and a library is not installed, or maybe you are a student in an university and you need to install some application that would take a snap using apt, but there is one problem… you are not root!

Here I introduce a (hacky) solution that you can try out to install packages in your user area, with the comfort of apt command.

Quick tutorial

First clone the notroot repository:

git clone https://github.com/Gregwar/notroot.git

Now add this line in your .bashrc file:

source "$HOME/notroot/bashrc"

And reload bash.

You can now give a try to notroot install [your package], for example:

# Installing a package, here some json libraries (example)
notroot install libjsoncpp-dev libjsoncpp0

Everything will be installed under your notroot/ directory, and the bashrc script you sourced above do additions to some environment variables (like $PATH, $LIBRARY_PATH…) in order to make it work.

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