Package install fails in Ubuntu 22.04

InfluxDB 1
, ,
1

This should be a bug report, and it just started happening yesterday, but I’m not sure where to file bugs like this…

After adding the repository to apt:

ubuntu@influx:~$ sudo apt install influxdb
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  influxdb
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 28 not upgraded.
Need to get 26.6 MB of archives.
After this operation, 115 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 https://repos.influxdata.com/debian stable/main amd64 influxdb amd64 1.11.8-1 [26.6 MB]
Fetched 26.6 MB in 3s (8047 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package influxdb.
(Reading database ... 64438 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../influxdb_1.11.8-1_amd64.deb ...
useradd: invalid user ID '-m'
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/influxdb_1.11.8-1_amd64.deb (--unpack):
 new influxdb package pre-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 3
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/influxdb_1.11.8-1_amd64.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The problem stems from a bad useradd command in the preinst script:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

LOG_DIR=/var/log/influxdb
DATA_DIR=/var/lib/influxdb

if ! id influxdb &>/dev/null; then
    useradd --system -u -m influxdb -s /bin/false -d "${data_dir}"
fi

Two problems:

  • The -u should be a -U. -u expects a UID.
  • The -d "${data_dir}" should be -d "${DATA_DIR}". The lowercase variable doesn’t exist.

A workaround is to run the correct useradd command before installing the package.

sudo useradd --system -U -m influxdb -s /bin/false -d /var/lib/influxdb
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