Troubleshooting Podman

Volume mounts on Mac

Home should be mounted by default on init:

$ podman machine init --help

# --snip--

  -v, --volume stringArray     Volumes to mount, source:target (default [$HOME:$HOME])

# --snip--

This currently (podman 4.3.1) mounts with security_model=mapped-xattr, which causes issues with symlinks (“Too many levels of symbolic links”) and possibly other areas as well. Mounting with security_model=none fixes this.

This can be set in two ways:

1. Specifying podman machine init -v "$HOME:$HOME:rw,security_model=none [..]"
2. Adding volumes = ["$HOME:$HOME:rw,security_model=none"] to the [machine] section in ~/.config/containers/containers.conf

See also:

• containers/podman#8016: Support native source folder for volume mount in remote model
• containers/podman#16102: Why symlinks from mounted macos folders are broken?

Machine init errors

1. Adding --now to podman machine init makes debugging easier.
2. In some cases where podman machine init fails, podman machine start will still boot a working instance.
3. Wiping images from $HOME/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/qemu/ after a podman machine rm may help in some cases.

gvproxy not found (Mac)

On Mac, I have had to explicitly list the directory containing gvproxy before things would work:

➜  cat ~/.config/containers/containers.conf
[engine]
  helper_binaries_dir = ["/usr/local/Cellar/podman/4.3.1/libexec/podman/"]