Error creating a container with Podman and persistent data

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1

Hello, I’m trying to pull a container in Cockpit using Podman and store its data on an mdraid. The mdraid was created successfully, but when I start the container and it begins to write data to the disk, nothing is created because it lacks permissions. I don’t know how to configure this: I’ve tried changing the user and granting read/write/execute permissions to everyone, but nothing works. The container is Dockge. This is what it returns:

2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [SERVER] INFO: Welcome to dockge!
2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [SERVER] INFO: NODE_ENV: production
2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [SERVER] INFO: Server Type: HTTP
2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [SERVER] INFO: Data Dir: ./data/
2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [DB]   WARN: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open 'data/db-config.json'
2025-04-25T11:05:16Z [SERVER] ERROR: Failed to prepare your database: EACCES: permission denied, open 'data/db-config.json'
2

First, I don’t know Cockpit.

Is that the GitHub - louislam/dockge: A fancy, easy-to-use and reactive self-hosted docker compose.yaml stack-oriented manager ?
It’s “compose.yaml” seems to define volumes.

    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - ./data:/app/data
      - /opt/stacks:/opt/stacks

The man podman-run describes option --volume to apparently be a
shorthand for use of --mount=type=bind,...

Logically, the data is a subdirectory of the working directory, where you run the ‘podman run’.
I did not browse deeper to see if/how to create the file data/db-config.json before you run the container.

It does look like that the “/opt/stacks” is for the “store its data on” and you would either mount the filesystem on the mdraid as /opt/stacks on the host, or modify that in the compose.yaml.

3

SELinux might be preventing the writes by the container. If it is enabled, you need to make sure the folders are labeled with container_file_t. On the command line you can achieve it by adding :Z to your volume: podman run -d -v ./data:/app/data:Z --name mycontainer myimage. I guess it should work with compose as well. On the volume definition you can try something like this:

    volumes:
      - ./data:/app/data:Z
1 Like
4

I found that the problem is SELinux blocking access to the RAID, thanks anyway.