Podman Rootless on Alpine Linux

alpine-podman-rootless.md

How to do rootless Podman on Alpine Linux

Using recent podman (3.x) on 5.10.x Alpine Linux Kernels

apk add podman util-linux

enable and start the cgroups and podman services

rc-update add cgroups
rc-update add podman
rc-service cgroups start
rc-service podman start

edit /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid, add mappings starting at 200000 or greater

load needed kernel modules

modprobe tun
modprobe fuse

test it out

podman unshare cat /proc/self/uid_map
       0       1024          1
       1     200000      65536

If you get this error:

% podman ps -a
Error: cannot re-exec process to join the existing user namespace

Try removing or examing your ~/.xdg/runtime hierarchy. That fixed it for me after looking at lots of strace logs I was not able to explain why it was not working.

rc-server -> rc-service

Thank you, fixed.