Tag Archives: podman

Rootless podman containers under system accounts, managed and enabled at boot with systemd

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While you can run containers as root on the host, or run rootless containers as your regular user (either as uid 0 or any another), sometimes it’s nice to create specific users to run one or more containers. This provides neat separation and can also improve security posture.

We also want those containers to act as regular system services; managed with systemd to auto-restart and be enabled on boot.

This assumes you’ve just installed Fedora (or RHEL/CentOS 8+) server and have a local user with sudo privileges. First, let’s also install some SELinux tools.

sudo dnf install -y /usr/sbin/semanage

Setting up the system user

Let’s create our system user, placing their home dir under /var/lib. For the purposes of this example I’m using a service account of busybox but this can be anything unique on the box. Note, if you prefer to have a real shell, then swap /bin/false with /bin/bash or other.

export SERVICE="busybox"

sudo useradd -r -m -d "/var/lib/${SERVICE}" -s /bin/false "${SERVICE}"

In order for our user to run containers automatically on boot, we need to enable systemd linger support. This will ensure that a user manager is run for the user at boot and kept around after logouts.

sudo loginctl enable-linger "${SERVICE}"
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Podman volumes and SELinux

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In my previous post on volumes with podman, I touched on SELinux but I think it’s worthy of its own post to work through some details.

If your host has SELinux enabled, then container processes are confined to the system_u:system_r:container_t:s0 domain. Volumes you pass to podman will need to have appropriate labels, otherwise the container won’t be able access the volume, no-matter what the filesystem permissions are.

When running rootless containers (as your non-root user), files in your homedir will probably have the context of unconfined_u:object_r:data_home_t:s0, however the context that is required for container volumes is system_u:object_r:container_file_t:s0.

Fortunately, container volumes which podman creates at runtime will have the appropriate context set automatically. However, for host-dir volumes podman will not change the context by default, you will need to tell it to.

Let’s spin up a busybox container without setting the SELinux context and note that the container is not able to access the host-dir volume.

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Volumes and rootless Podman

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Containers generally run from an image and have no access to the host file system. This is fine for stand-alone ephemeral containers, but others require persistent data. While we can pass in environment variables to configure the app inside the container, sometimes a place to read and write more complex files is needed. When you update or replace such a container (perhaps with a new release) you want the new container to have access to the same data as the previous one.

The tricky thing with rootless containers is that you’re not root on the host and, as per my previous post, containers can run as any user id. If the container runs as root (uid 0) then that is fine as it actually maps to your non-root user on the host (e.g. 1000) and management of the data is therefore easy. However, containers running as other users (e.g. 123) will map to a uid on the host based on the subuid offset range (e.g. 100122) which will not match your non-root user and therefore data management is harder.

Providing persistent storage to a container is done by setting up a bind mounts using the --volume (or -v) option with podman. Note that volumes are not restricted to just one per container, simply repeat the -v option for as many volumes as required!

The volume option uses a colon separated format specifying the source on the host and then the destination directory where the volume is mounted to inside the container (e.g. src:/dest).

The source is generally one of two types; either a container volume (like a container image) or a regular host directory.

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User IDs and (rootless) containers with Podman

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When a Linux container image is created, like any system it can have specific users, or maybe it only has root (uid 0). Containers have a specific entry point which runs the program the image was created for and this might run as any user in the image, it’s up to whoever created it.

You can use podman (a daemonless container engine) to easily see what uid an image will use, by getting the container to run the id command instead of the default entry point.

For example, here we can see that busybox wants to run as root (uid 0).

# podman run --rm --entrypoint '' docker.io/busybox id
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

However, grafana wants to run as the grafana user with uid 472 .

# podman run --rm --entrypoint '' docker.io/grafana/grafana id
uid=472(grafana) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

OK, so inside the containers we are running as different users, but as we’re running as root those same uids are also used on the host system.

Running containers as root

Let’s run a grafana container as root and see that the actual grafana-server process on the host is running under uid 472.

# podman run -d docker.io/grafana/grafana
ee275572c8dcb0922722b7d6c3e5ff0bda8c9af3682018c4fc53675d8e189e59
# ps -o user $(pidof grafana-server)
USER
472
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Fedora Silverblue is an amazing immutable desktop

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I recently switched my regular Fedora 31 workstation over to the 31 Silverblue release. I’ve played with Project Atomic before and have been meaning to try it out more seriously for a while, but never had the time. Silverblue provided the catalyst to do that.

What this brings to the table is quite amazing and seriously impressive. The base OS is immutable and everyone’s install is identical. This means quality can be improved as there are less combinations and it’s easier to test. Upgrades to the next major version of Fedora are fast and secure. Instead of updating thousands of RPMs in-place, the new image is downloaded and the system reboots into it. As the underlying images don’t change, it also offers full rollback support.

This is similar to how platforms like Chrome OS and Android work, but thanks to ostree it’s now available for Linux desktops! That is pretty neat.

It doesn’t come with a standard package manager like dnf. Instead, any packages or changes you need to perform on the base OS are done using rpm-ostree command, which actually layers them on top.

And while technically you can install anything using rpm-ostree, ideally this should be avoided as much as possible (some low level apps like shells and libvirt may require it, though). Flatpak apps and containers are the standard way to consume packages. As these are kept separate from the base OS, it also helps improve stability and reliability.

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Easy containers on Fedora with toolbox

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The toolbox program is a wrapper for setting up containers on Fedora. It’s not doing anything you can’t do yourself with podman, but it does make using and managing containers more simple and easy to do. It comes by default on Silverblue where it’s aimed for use with terminal apps and dev work, but you can try it on a regular Fedora workstation.

sudo dnf install toolbox

Creating containers

You can create just one container if you want, which will be called something like fedora-toolbox-32, or you can create separate containers for different things. Up to you. As an example, let’s create a container called testing-f32.

toolbox create --container testing-f32

By default toolbox uses the Fedora registry and creates a container which is the same version as your host. However you can specify a different version if you need to, for example if you needed a Fedora 30 container.

toolbox create --release f30 --container testing-f30

These containers are not yet running, they’ve just been created for you.

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