InvalidOperationException: Environment variable HOME not defined

Greetings,

There appears to be a hard requirement for npgsql to have an environment variable HOME defined in a specific setup. Is this a bug?

I’m running npgsql 5.0.5 in a C# dotnet core 3.1 project in a AWS lambda container. The aws lambda environment is Amazon Linux 2 and it does not specify a HOME variable. A home directory doesn’t exist.

Stack trace:

...\Database\PostgresClient.cs:line 52System.InvalidOperationException: Environment variable HOME not defined
   at Npgsql.PostgresEnvironment.GetHomeDir()
   at Npgsql.PostgresEnvironment.GetHomePostgresDir()
   at Npgsql.PostgresEnvironment.get_SslCertDefault()
   at Npgsql.NpgsqlConnector.RawOpen(NpgsqlTimeout timeout, Boolean async, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
   at Npgsql.NpgsqlConnector.Open(NpgsqlTimeout timeout, Boolean async, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
   at Npgsql.ConnectorPool.OpenNewConnector(NpgsqlConnection conn, NpgsqlTimeout timeout, Boolean async, CancellationToken cancellationToken)
   at Npgsql.ConnectorPool.<>c__DisplayClass38_0.<<Rent>g__RentAsync|0>d.MoveNext()

It appears that npgsql is just looking for a cert bundle? I tried providing a local cert bundle and providing the location in the connection string and it didn’t help. I can get around the issue by specifying the HOME variable to a temporary directory which works around the issue.

if (IsLambdaRunningInAwsContainer()) Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable("HOME", "/tmp");

With this work around I don’t need to provide my own cert bundle - it seem that npgsql can still find it on the instance.

[roji]

Not really… I guess I just assumed these environment variables are always present (which is almost always the case 😅).

Submitted #3730 to fix.

[czioutas]

Great, I used the CI version and it worked as expected. Thank you very much for the work and the quick responses. I will monitor to upgrade to the normal version instead of the CI. Hope you have a great day!