Chocolatey-coreteampackages: (tor-browser) Does not have permission to start non-admin

[choco-bot]

Comment: There's a problem with the installation's location when trying to start Tor from a non-admin (Windows) user account.

When I launch "Start Tor Browser" in C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tor-browser\tools\tor-browser from such an account, I get the message "Tor Browser does not have permission to access the profile. Please adjust your file system permissions and try again."

I guess the reason is that while installing via chocolatey, the latter has/needs admin privileges - so no problem there as chocolatey has been started with elevated privileges.

But when trying to start Tor Browser afterwards from a non-admin user account, that account doesn't have writing privileges for C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\tor-browser\tools\tor-browser\Browser.

A related, albeit smaller problem is that there exists no link/icon for Tor Browser in Windows' Start menu or on its desktop when running a non-admin account.

This problem doesn't exist when installing Tor Browser without chocolatey.

This comment has been added to the disqus forum thread for tor-browser.

Package Url: https://chocolatey.org/packages/tor-browser
Comment Url: https://chocolatey.org/packages/tor-browser#comment-2869386145

[RiseT]

I'm the author of the original post quoted above.

I'd like to add that it's very likely that other applications (than Tor Browser) installed at C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\ are effected by the same issue as well, as the root cause is rather a systemic one: No application started without admin privileges has write access to that directory.

[majkinetor]

You can quickly fix this for one or all packages by setting permission for yourself on given file or folder.

[RiseT]

You can quickly fix this for one or all packages by setting permission for yourself on given file or folder.

Don't you feel this is rather a workaround than a real and long-term solution? Everyone using a standard, i. e. non-admin user account will have this issue.

[majkinetor]

Sure it is, just sayin' what you can do if it troubles you now.

[RiseT]

Alright then - thanks for taking the time!

[majkinetor]

I am not sure what can be done tbh if the software doesn't provide some means to do so. Or Perhaps Start-ProcessAsNonAdmin is in check for cases like this because although choco itself needs it installer may not.

But this is basically the case for many pacakges. For instance some tools keep profiles in Program Files (example - ConEmu does this by default).

[ferventcoder]

So, there are a couple of things you can do here related to choco - I'm guessing you've read over https://chocolatey.org/install and you've probably seen the option for a non-administrative installation. Maybe that is out and you want to keep Chocolatey in the default install location - there is something you can do so that your user in a non-administrative context has permissions -as noted at https://github.com/chocolatey/choco/issues/398

[ferventcoder]

In prior installations, we ensured Modify access to the installing user, but that has been removed for security reasons. Should you need the previous behavior, set $env:ChocolateyInstallAllowCurrentUser="true".

[ferventcoder]

So if you create a machine or user level variable set as requested and then rerun an install of choco, you should be good. HTH.

[majkinetor]

@AdmiringWorm will look into this after a new year since Firefox stuff can be reused here.

[AdmiringWorm]

sure, I'll take a look at this after the new years

[AdmiringWorm]

since @pascalberger have started on migrating the tor-browser to AU, I'm assigning him to this issue

[WiliTest]

Found the answer here: https://tor.stackexchange.com/a/13765/17207

[majkinetor]

That is already suggested