Codeman itself always lived under $HOME; administrator rights were only
spent on what it needs first (system packages for Node.js, tmux and git,
Homebrew on a Mac). An account without those rights could not install it:
the installer died in ensure_sudo, or in Homebrew's own installer.
install.sh now has a no-admin route, taken by itself when the account has
no administrator rights (no sudo binary; outside sudo/wheel/admin and
`sudo -n true` fails; a refused sudo password; a Mac account outside the
admin group with no writable Homebrew) and forced with --no-admin or
CODEMAN_NO_ADMIN=1:
- Node.js: the official tarball from nodejs.org, checked against the
SHASUMS256.txt published beside it, into ~/.codeman/runtime/node.
- tmux: the tmux project's own build (tmux/tmux-builds 3.7c), checked
against a SHA-256 pinned in the installer, into ~/.codeman/runtime/bin.
- Both are linked from ~/.local/bin (never over a file that is not ours),
and the runtime is on PATH and on the LaunchAgent's PATH.
- git is never installed. Without a working git the source comes as an
archive, the install is marked with .install-source, and it updates by
re-running the installer: the new tree is built beside the old one and
swapped in only after the build succeeded. A later re-run on a machine
that has gained git turns it back into a clone.
- Nothing on this route runs sudo, Homebrew or `xcode-select --install`,
and the route is never decided by `sudo -v`.
What it cannot supply is checked before the first download: a C/C++
toolchain on Linux (node-pty 1.1.0 compiles there), musl, and macOS below
15 (the tmux build's deployment target).
Along the way:
- check_git no longer trusts `command -v git`. On a Mac without the Xcode
Command Line Tools /usr/bin/git is a stub that opens Apple's install
dialog; it is judged by `xcode-select -p` and never executed. Any other
git is asked for its version.
- scripts/git-hooks.mjs answers "not a checkout" without running git, for
the same reason: postinstall calls it on every npm install.
- The in-app updater knows the install kind `archive` and points such an
install at the installer instead of `npm i -g aicodeman@latest`.
- download() and download_to_stdout() resolve DOWNLOADER themselves. Only
main() used to set it, so `install.sh cloudflared` died on `set -u` with
the message swallowed by the step log.
- The AI CLI menu leaves out a Homebrew-only install command where there
is no Homebrew.
Verified with the real installer: a bare Ubuntu 24.04 container as an
unprivileged user (install, a PTY round trip through the API, update by
re-run, cloudflared, uninstall), the same without a compiler (stops before
any download), with a broken then working git, with sudo present but not
usable, and on macOS 26 (arm64) in an isolated HOME with sudo, brew, git,
the compilers, launchctl and tailscale replaced by tripwires. Not verified
on a real standard macOS account: that account was an administrator.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- pre-push hook: skip with a notice when npm is not on PATH (GUI git
clients and IDEs often run hooks with a minimal PATH), instead of
blocking every push on "npm: not found"; real-push test with a
stripped PATH
- test/git-hooks.test.ts: pin GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM=1 and
GIT_CONFIG_GLOBAL=/dev/null around the resolveGitHooksDir tests, so
an exported global or a system core.hooksPath no longer fails them
- watch tsconfig.json, .prettierignore and .editorconfig too:
typecheck and format:check read them
- check:browser-excludes: fail loudly when the vitest list output and
the walked test/**/*.test.ts tree share no path (format drift would
otherwise pass vacuously)
- Reword the PRE_PUSH_MARKER comment: bumping its version would make every
installed v1 hook read as foreign and never refresh again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
resolveGitHooksDir now returns a directory only when it is the repo's own
<git-common-dir>/hooks (compared on canonical paths), so a core.hooksPath
elsewhere, global or repo-local, is never written to by postinstall, while a
core.hooksPath pointing back at the repo's own .git/hooks still resolves.
The pre-push hook skips with a one-line notice when a pushed ref is not the
checked-out HEAD (tags peeled) or when git status shows uncommitted or
untracked changes under a path the checks read (src, config, scripts, test,
package.json, package-lock.json, install.sh), since the checks read the
working tree rather than the pushed commit.
Also: honest timing (~10-40s instead of ~15s), CLAUDE.md Session Safety note
on CODEMAN_SKIP_PREPUSH for another session's WIP, 14 (not 9) Playwright
tests, and a note that the browser-excludes check only sees direct imports.
npm run check:browser-excludes finds tests that import a browser driver and
asks `vitest list` whether the CI config still collects them; wired into CI.
npm install now also installs a marker-owned pre-push hook that runs the
static CI checks (~15s). Skip with CODEMAN_SKIP_PREPUSH=1; hand-written
hooks are left alone.
Codeman maintainer