Permission Denied when open lazygit

[caturbgs]

Describe the bug

When try open lazygit on some repos, i have an error says 2025/10/01 10:28:35 mkdir /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/T/lazygit-100169190: permission denied instead open the laazygit

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to repos that have git
2. Type lazygit
3. See error

Expected behavior

Open the TUI lazygit

Screenshots

Version info:

• Run lazygit --version and paste the result here
  commit=, build date=, build source=Homebrew, version=0.55.1, os=darwin, arch=arm64, git version=2.39.5 (Apple Git-154)
• Run git --version and paste the result here
  git version 2.39.5 (Apple Git-154)

Additional context

Add any other context about the problem here.

Note

Please try updating to the latest version or manually building the latest master to see if the issue still occurs.

[wm-139-dev]

Same issue after update to the macOS Sequioa 15.6.* -> 15.7.1
Maybe this will help

[caturbgs]

Same issue after update to the macOS Sequioa 15.6.* -> 15.7.1 Maybe this will help

Now I realize that this issue occurred after upgrading the macOS version. This forced me to upgrade to macOS 26, and the problem has been resolved.

[stefanhaller]

For those who have this problem, it sounds like you don't have write permissions in $TMPDIR. This seems very strange to me, I thought that directory is per user, so it should be owned by the current user.

Can you please post the output of id and ls -ld $TMPDIR?

I'm still on 15.6 myself, so I might try updating to 15.7.1 to see if I also have the problem then. I will only get around to it next week though. (I don't want to install 26 yet.)

[wm-139-dev]

@stefanhaller
ls -ld $TMPDIR => drwx------ 62 root wheel 1984 Oct 2 10:41 /var/folders/zz/zyxvpxvq6csfxvn_n0000000000000/T/
id => uid=502(username)... (I am not permitted to disclose the full information.)

Thank you!

[stefanhaller]

Ok, that's clear then: TMPDIR is owned by root, so you can't write to it as a normal user. Wonder if that's a bug in macOS.

I'm honestly not sure what we can do about that, short of detecting the problem and showing a better error message.

I'm also wondering how any software can work under these cirmunstances.

Just found google-gemini/gemini-cli#8690 which seems to be the same problem.

[jnmach]

I've had the exact same issue after a forced update to 15.7.1, not only with LazyVim but also with other things, such as LSP servers. I tried a couple of things, but what really helped was simply quitting and reopening my terminal 🤷‍♂️

[stefanhaller]

That's also what people in that Gemini issue say helped. I wonder what this did though: did it actually fix the permissions of that folder (that's likely not possible without prompting for admin rights), or did it simply set TMPDIR to some other folder?

[jnmach]

In my case it is using a different folder now. Before it was/var/folders/zz/* and now it's using /var/folders/t3/*

[BoaPi]

had the same problem after updating to 15.7.1, but after I also updated the XTools everything went back to normal.

[shetty-tejas]

Doing this before calling lazygit worked for me:

TMPDIR=$(getconf DARWIN_USER_TEMP_DIR)

Seems like something broke for me after updating to MacOS 15.7.1

If rebooting doesn't work for you, but the above code does, might as well set it in your .rc file.

[stefanhaller]

I updated to 15.7.1 today, and I didn't have this problem. My $TMPDIR was owned by me, and was writeable. It also pointed to the same directory as getconf DARWIN_USER_TEMP_DIR. Shrug.

I opened #4968 to improve the error message a bit, I guess that's all we can do here.