Install ZSH Without Root

Introduction

Last week I accidentally overwrote my .bashrc file and could not rescue it back (really should have used a dotfiles manager like Chezmoi). I then said to myself that this might be the best time to try out some other shells. I’ve always wanted to try out newer, more modern ones like zsh and fish, but failed quite a few times given the difficulty to install them without package managers and root access. Therefore, I decided to give it another try during the holiday season.

The below steps and configurations are borrowed from this CSDN article, since it was the only one I found out to be working.

Install ncurses

The first difficulty I ran into is that the server did not have ncurses library. Thus, I had to compile it myself.

export CXXFLAGS="-fPIC"
export CFLAGS="-fPIC"
export NCURSES_HOME=/path/to/ncurses
export PATH=$NCURSES_HOME/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$NCURSES_HOME/lib${LD_LIBRARY_PATH:+:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}}"
export CPPFLAGS="-I$NCURSES_HOME/include" LDFLAGS="-L$NCURSES_HOME/lib"
 
mkdir -p $NCURSES_HOME && cd $NCURSES_HOME
wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ncurses/ncurses-6.5.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ncurses-6.5.tar.gz
cd ncurses-6.1
./configure --prefix=$NCURSES_HOME --with-shared --without-debug --enable-widec
make && make install

Install zsh

export ZSH_HOME=/path/to/zsh
mkdir -p $ZSH_HOME && cd $ZSH_HOME
wget https://www.zsh.org/pub/zsh-5.9.tar.xz
tar -xvf zsh-5.9.tar.xz
 
cd zsh-5.9
./configure --prefix=$ZSH_HOME
make && make install

After that, ZSH should be executable as a binary under $ZSH_HOME/bin. Remember to add it to your $PATH environment variable to run it.

export PATH=$ZSH_HOME/bin:$PATH

Setting zsh as the Default Shell

Since I don’t have root permission, chsh wouldn’t work for me. I ended up adding the following settings to my .bashrc:

export PATH=$ZSH_HOME/bin:$PATH
export SHELL=$ZSH_HOME/bin/zsh
exec zsh