I’m trying to switch my existing Docker setup to a rootless podman one. The main issue tripping me is how to mount remote volumes. My file server is a different machine, so I mount the data into docker containers via a NFS volume. However, I can’t do this with podman since the normal user doesn’t have the rights for mounting NFS drives. Only the root user can do that.

One option I’ve thought of is to mount everything I need via fstab and use bind mounts. Is there a better solution?

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Update: I took some suggestions and ideas from the comments here and built a system for this:

    • Create the mountpoint directories
    • Add the mounts to /etc/fstab with the user,noauto option
    • I’m using quadlets, so add a new [service] section to my container file and add ExecStartPre and ExecStopPost entries with mount and umount commands
    • Add bind mount volumes to the NFS shares pointing to the local mountpoint

    This allows me to have the mounts only active when the container is running. And I can still have rootless podman containers. Seems to be working well in the limited testing I did yesterday.