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Installing Lmod without root permissions

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Kenneth Hoste edited this page Sep 10, 2013 · 30 revisions

This short guide will show how to install Lmod (and Lua, on which it depends) on Linux, without requiring root permissions.

Lua

Build and install Lua using the source tarball available in the Lmod SourceForge repository (http://sourceforge.net/projects/lmod/files/). This version is a lot easier to build, and already includes the required Lua modules. At the time of writing this relates to the lua-5.1.4.5.tar.gz tarball.

  1. Download and unpack lua-5.1.4.5.tar.gz.

  2. Adjust the lua/src/Makefile.in makefile template to enforce static linking of the readline and ncurses libraries (to avoid problems with libreadline and/or ncurses modules that are loaded), using the following patch:

diff -ru lua-5.1.4.5.orig/lua/src/Makefile.in lua-5.1.4.5/lua/src/Makefile.in
--- lua-5.1.4.5.orig/lua/src/Makefile.in	2011-02-18 19:49:01.000000000 +0100
+++ lua-5.1.4.5/lua/src/Makefile.in	2013-06-02 13:22:28.601496000 +0200
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@
 	$(MAKE) all MYCFLAGS=
 
 linux:
-	$(MAKE) all MYCFLAGS="$(MYCFLAGS) -DLUA_USE_LINUX" MYLIBS="-Wl,-E -ldl @LIBS@ -lncurses"
+	$(MAKE) all MYCFLAGS="$(MYCFLAGS) -DLUA_USE_LINUX" MYLIBS="-Wl,-E -ldl -Wl,-Bstatic @LIBS@ -lncurses -Wl,-Bdynamic"
 
 macosx:
 #	$(MAKE) all MYCFLAGS=-DLUA_USE_MACOSX

This can be done by saving the patch above in a file named lua-5.1.4.5_Makefile-static-linking.patch (beware of tabs when copy-pasting the patch!), and running the following command in the unpacked lua-5.1.4.5 directory:

patch -p1 < lua-5.1.4.5_Makefile-static-linking.patch
  1. Configure, build and install Lua in a custom prefix, e.g., $HOME/lua. Make sure you have libreadline and ncurses available on your system.
./configure --prefix=$HOME/lua && make && make install
  1. Make sure the lua binary is available in your $PATH (pro tip: put this in your .bashrc):
export PATH=$HOME/lua/bin:$PATH

Lmod

  1. Download and unpack the latest available Lmod version, Lmod-5.1.5.tar.bz2 at the time of writing.
tar xfvj Lmod-5.1.5.tar.bz2 && cd Lmod-5.1.5
  1. Configure, build and install Lmod build, in a custom prefix:
./configure --prefix=$HOME && make pre-install
  1. Update $PATH so lmod is available (put this in your .bashrc):
export PATH=$HOME/lmod/5.1.5/libexec:$PATH
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