Starship can't read its config file

[Jarmos-san]

I use Starship to customize my prompt(s). As suggested in the docs, I have it configured through a custom config file as well which is located under %USERPROFILE%. There's no issue on Windows PowerShell whatsoever but it fails on Git Bash due to permission issues.

So, each time I start a Git Bash session, I see this error:

[ERROR] - (starship::config): Unable to read config file content: Access is denied. (os error 5)

I've tried invoking a Git Bash session with admin privileges as well but with no luck. So, is there anything I should try out to debug this issue?

Or if there's a solution to it, it would be nice if you could share it.

[rimrul]

Looking at their documentation, they seem to be trying to open ~/.config/starship.toml (unless something else is configured in $STARSHIP_CONFIG). So I'd probably first take a look at the content of $HOME and $STARSHIP_CONFIG.

[Jarmos-san]

Hmm...weird! I don't see the error message anymore & I might've resolved this issue with very subtle fix (not sure if I should call it that) as well lol

Here's what worked:

export $STARSHIP_CONFIG="$HOME/path/to/config/file"

What didn't work is:

export $STARSHIP_CONFIG="~/path/to/config/file"

The ~ & the $HOME made all the difference, even though they should evaluate to the same value.

Any idea what's going on here? Is it an issue with git-for-windows or starship? If its the later than I think report this issue on its bug tracker.

[rimrul]

Ok, I think I know what's going on here.
$HOME probably gets expanded by bash as soon as you export $STARSHIP_CONFIG so that probably then gets converted from a value like /c/users/foo/path/to/config to something like c:/users/foo/path/to/config when calling the native starship executable.

The version with ~ on the other hand? Bash expects the recieving application to expand that. Starship probably passes the unmodified value to the native function to open a file and Windows being Windows doesn't find a folder named ~. So not really a bug in either one, but an odd side effect from crossing between unix-ish and non-unix-ish systems.

[Jarmos-san]

For anyone else stumbling across this issue, here's what you got to do:

Leave this line of code in your .bashrc:

# Example: $HOME/.config/starship.toml
export $STARSHIP_CONFIG="$HOME/path/to/config/file"

Refer to this thread for a possible explanation on this issue. And for more info on configuration details find the details on the official docs. Additionally, feel free to track this issue here.