How to make emacs work properly without having permission on $HOME directory

Question

On one server I don't have permission to create new files inside my home directory. Whenever I start emacs I gets following error:

Creating directory: permission denied, /home/vivek/.emacs.d/

How to start emacs using different directory or without .emacs.d

Answer 1

If you change the value of the HOME environmental variable, emacs will treat the directory specified as if it were your home directory. From bash:

HOME=/some/other/place emacs