Install yay without access to $USER variable?

[givensuman]

I'm trying to configure a system-wide Distrobox configuration in /usr/share and I'd like it to be an Arch Linux distro with yay. I'm aware something like this

init_hooks="export USER=<your_user>"
init_hooks="cd ~/Downloads"
init_hooks="git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-bin.git"
init_hooks="sudo chown -R $USER:$USER yay-bin"
init_hooks="sudo chmod -R 777 yay-bin"
init_hooks="sudo -u $USER sh -c "cd yay-bin && makepkg -si --noconfirm""
init_hooks="rm -r yay-bin"

works, but I don't have knowledge of who the user is. Is there a workaround?

[givensuman]

This doesn't appear to be possible; I was able to get a Toolbx built from a Containerfile in this manner, but you can't mount the installing user's /home directory so it never mounts; I suspect the same would happen with Distrobox.

In short, best you can do is build an Arch container and provide a script or binary to install yay.