Linux – Getting “Insecure world writable dir /home/chance ” in PATH, mode 040777 for Rails and Gem on Ubuntu 10.10

gemlinuxrubyruby-on-railsUbuntu

I've tried this but it didn't work and seemed to be for osx. I have a fresh Ubuntu 10.10 (x64) install with rvm, rails 3 and ruby 1.9.2. I have a new rails app but using either gem or rails results in the following warnings (with lag).

$ rails -v

/home/chance/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180@global/gems/railties-3.0.5/lib/rails/script_rails_loader.rb:11: warning: Insecure world writable dir /home/chance in PATH, mode 040777
/home/chance/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p180@global/gems/bundler-1.0.10/lib/bundler/runtime.rb:136: warning: Insecure world writable dir /home/chance in PATH, mode 040777
Rails 3.0.5

$ gem -v 

/home/chance/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p180/bin/gem:4: warning: Insecure world writable dir /home/chance in PATH, mode 040777
1.6.2

Just incase it matters, here is my Gemfile:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails'
# Bundle edge Rails instead:
# gem 'rails', :git => 'git://github.com/rails/rails.git'
gem 'sqlite3'
gem 'sqlite3-ruby', :require => 'sqlite3'
gem "haml"
gem "formtastic"
gem "will_paginate"
gem "devise"
gem "delayed_job"
gem "whenever"
gem "memcache-client"
gem "capistrano"
group :testing do
  gem "rspec"
  gem "rspec-rails"
  gem "autotest-standalone"
  gem "autotest-rails"
  gem "autotest-growl"
  gem "mocha"
  gem "shoulda"
  gem "factory_girl_rails"
end

group :development do
  gem "cheat"
  gem "bullet"
  gem "ruby-growl"

end

Best Answer

The message indicates that the directory /home/chance can be written to by everyone, which is a potential security hole. That could allow malicious users to put files in that directory and then the owner of the directory could use the accidentally.

To fix, remove the world-writable bit from /home/chance:

$ chmod o-w /home/chance

If you aren't the owner of /home/chance, you will need to do this as root via sudo:

$ sudo chmod o-w /home/chance
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