I am moving from Docker to rootless podman and one thing that’s surprising to me is that podman can create files that my user is, seemingly, not allowed to even read, so I need root to backup them.
For example, this one created by the postgres service of immich:
-rw-------. 1 525286 525286 1.6K Oct 2 20:16 /var/home/railcar/immich/postgres/pg_stat_tmp/global.stat
Is this expected in general (not for immich in particular)? Is there a single solution to solve this of does it have to be built in the images? It really feels wrong that I can start a container that will create files I am not allowed to even read.
In addition to
podman unshare(which you would just prefix in front of commands like chmod), you can just temporarily dopodman unshare chown -R root: <path>if you backup while the container is down. Don’t try that command on live containers.For a more permanent solution, you can investigate which user (ID) is the default in the container and add the option
--user-ns=“keep-id:uid=$the_user_id”. This does not work with all images, especially those that use multiple users per container, but if it works, the bind mount will have the same owner as the host.To find the user ID, you can run
podman exec <container> id. In most of the images I use, it’s usually 1000.