gitit seems to refer to default.conf

[chrisSCM]

When starting gitit with a non-privileged user, I find that despite using "-f" with a specific config file, gitit still refers to the default.conf. Of course, the non-privileged user doesn't have the right to access the build directory and its contents.
The error is:
gitit: /root/gitit/.stack-work/install/x86_64-linux/lts-12.4/8.4.3/share/x86_64-linux-ghc-8.4.3/gitit-0.12.2.1/data/default.conf: openFile: permission denied (Permission denied)
The command was:
sudo -u gitit /var/local/wiki/startup.sh
with startup.sh containing:
/usr/local/bin/gitit -f wiki.conf
and being located in the wiki folder.

[jgm]

Gitit needs to refer to the system default.conf in order to get defaults for fields not provided by the one you use with -f. Seems like your gitit wasn't properly installed. The data files should be installed outside of the build directory. Did you use 'stack install'? There's an open issue on stack regarding this: commercialhaskell/stack#848 Quoting from my comment from 2017:

I don't understand why this hasn't been fixed by now. It is a serious problem if stack can't be used to install data files to a location outside the stack work directory. Cabal has been able to do this from the beginning. Is there some serious conceptual problem with supporting it for stack?

See also #599. Can you install using cabal install instead? That should properly install the data files. What we should do is add a flag `embed_data_files`, as we have for pandoc and pandoc-citeproc. This would allow the data files to be embedded in the executable, avoiding this problem altogether.