Hi @tete1030! Thanks for the clear report. This is a good point—I’d
considered the multi-user case and determined that it wouldn’t be a
problem for reading files in this directory, but didn’t realize that
it would not be possible to write new files in the directory.

I think that the following patch should suffice, at least on Unices:

diff --git a/tensorboard/manager.py b/tensorboard/manager.py
index a86c010b..92f7601f 100644
--- a/tensorboard/manager.py
+++ b/tensorboard/manager.py
@@ -235,6 +235,7 @@ def _get_info_dir():
   The directory will be created if it does not exist.
   """
   path = os.path.join(tempfile.gettempdir(), ".tensorboard-info")
+  old_umask = os.umask(0o000)
   try:
     os.makedirs(path)
   except OSError as e:
@@ -242,6 +243,8 @@ def _get_info_dir():
       pass
     else:
       raise
+  finally:
+    os.umask(old_umask)
   return path
 

I’ll have to test this on Windows. If you’re looking for a quick fix,
you should be able to patch your TensorBoard install as above. (Or just
chmod a+w /tmp/.tensorboard-info, which will work until the next time
that /tmp/ is cleared.)

@tete1030 Any update on this ?
@wchargin Please let me know if you want me to keep this issue open until Windows test ?

Sorry that I didn't reply. The patch works great and I have not encountered this problem again.

Great—glad to hear that the patch is working, @tete1030 (and sorry for
the inconvenience).

@hgadig: Yes, please keep this open.

Hey there, just stumbled upon this, I just thought I'd mention that this patch doesn't fix the issue from the non-sudo user perspective. I added the patch first, but It did not fix the problem, as I do not have write access on that directory anyway. I'm gonna try and change the ".tensorboard-info" name to something unique, and hope this works. I'm thinking it might be nice to be able to customize this location, on a per-user basis ?

@lebrice, could you clarify what you mean by the “non-sudo user
perspective”? I can see from @tete1030’s screenshot that they’re not
running as root or with sudo. Does your user account not have write
access to $TMPDIR?

(To be clear, the patch needs to be applied before the info directory
is first created. If you’ve created a write-restricted info directory as
root by running TensorBoard without this patch, then yes, you’ll need to
remove it or change its mode.)