It’s unusual to have root creating/updating files several subdirectories deep within a regular user account, so the ideal solution is to figure out why that is and try to fix it that way.
However, if that isn’t an option, there are a few potential alternatives. Which one is best will depend on how the auth file is being created/updated (e.g. is Docker involved, etc.):
- If file
/home/USER/sincronitzat/pc-USER/Documents/homeassistant/homeassistant_config/.storage/auth is updated in-place instead of being deleted then recreated, a simple chmod a+r auth might be enough. Of course this assumes that Home Assistant doesn’t reset the permission bits.
- If
chmod isn’t enough, then setfacl might be a solution (getfacl and setfacl are part of the acl – access control list – package).
- Set the
umask so that Home Assistant creates files that are always readable by your USER account.
- Use bindfs to present a virtual storage volume that Syncthing has full read-access to.
Without knowing what the current permissions look like (e.g. seeing the output from ls -l auth), I’m making some assumptions and guesses so I’m not able to be more specific about the commands for options 1, 2 and 3.
Option 4 is a bit more complicated to understand, but really quite easy to implement. The basic idea is to present an alternate view of the files and directories to Syncthing – one where the contents are owned by the user running Syncthing.
First, you’ll need the bindfs package. It’s not usually installed by default but every Linux distro I’ve ever used lately includes it in its official package repository.
Then based on what you posted earlier, set up the bind mount with the following command (or another suitable method):
mount --verbose --types fuse.bindfs --options ro,noatime,force-user=USER,force-group=USER /home/USER/sincronitzat/pc-USER/Documents/ /mnt/Documents/
(The ro and noatime options can be left out if you want read/write access and access times to be updated.)
If the mount is successful, the contents of /mnt/Documents/ will all be virtually owned by user USER and group USER regardless of the real ownership in the underlying ext4 filesystem. As long as the user running Syncthing matches, there will be no read-access issues. As far as Home Assistant is concerned, nothing has changed because it’s still using /home/USER/sincronitzat/pc-USER/Documents/homeassistant/ while Syncthing is simultaneously accessing via /mnt/Documents/homeassistant/.
(The mount point /mnt/Documents/ is just an arbitrary choice so it could just as well be /home/USER/Syncthing/. Wherever it is, point Syncthing at it.)
Of course, if you’re not just sending the contents of /home/USER/sincronitzat/pc-USER/Documents/ to another device, but also receiving changes, you’ll have to make the appropriate adjustments.