devcontainers / devcontainers/cli

Podman fix: derive `--userns=keep-id` mapping from the remote user's actual UID/GID

Open
#1,284 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
3k
Forks
457
Avg merge
13h 17m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

## The problem

When running a dev container with rootless podman, the Dev Containers CLI injects a plain `--userns=keep-id` flag, which maps the host user id to the *same UID number* inside the container.

This breaks for high/out-of-range host UIDs (e.g. AD/SSSD users which have values like`1400601154`, which are not valid inside the container (they are out of range as the containers are typically given a 0-65535 range via subuid/subgid mapping). As a result the mapping fails silently and the container's `vscode` user remains at UID 1000, not matching the host user, and causing `Permission denied` on the workspace bind mount).

## Current workaround

The current workaround is a fragile manual `runArgs` entry (`--userns=keep-id:uid=1000,gid=1000`). Since the host UID is unmappable to itself, we keep the 1000 id inside the container and map the host user to that. This allows one to use podman on Linux boxes with AD and thus high uid/gid combinations, as it removes the requirement for the exact host UID to be inside the container's range.

## The request for improvement

Instead of injecting a plain `--userns=keep-id`, the CLI should resolve the `remoteUser`'s actual UID/GID in the image and emit `--userns=keep-id:uid=,gid=`. This fixes the high-UID case with no regressions: when the host UID already equals the container user's UID, `keep-id:uid=X,gid=X` produces the identical mapping to plain `keep-id`, so existing setups are unaffected.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.