11mo ago

Podman - container exits without logs

I'm new to Podman and so far have been completely frustrated by it.
I don't know if the issue is with the container or Podman since there are just no logs.

I'm trying to run Stirling-PDF, using this command:

podman run -d
\ -p 8080:8080
\ -v /location/of/trainingData:/usr/share/tesseract-ocr/5/tessdata
\ -v /location/of/extraConfigs:/configs
\ -v /location/of/logs:/logs
\ -e DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false
\ --name stirling-pdf
\ frooodle/s-pdf:latest

With Docker, I have no issue running the this container. Under Podman the container immediately exits without logs - podman logs stirling-pdf shows nothing.

The same thing happens running the same command with sudo or without sudo but using --rootful. I've also tried removing '-e DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false since it's very Docker specific.

I can run podman run -dt --name webserver -p 8081:80 quay.io/libpod/banner with no issues, so is this something incompatible with the container?

I feel like I'm missing something obvious - like where are the logs?

I'm running on OpenSUSE-Tumbleweed, Podman version 4.9.0

19 comments

You need to tell Podman which container repo to use. Contrary to Docker it doesn't just assume Dockerhub. Try with docker.io/frooodle/s-pdf:latest
If you run the Podman container via the systemd integration it will have logs like any other service.
- Ah, looks like I should have used journalctl -b | grep stirling-pdf
- Thanks, docker.io/frooodle/s-pdf:latest was the only repository that would download it from the options it gave me. I'm working through the other suggestions as well. journalctl isn't giving me anything when I try grep with stirling, podman or s-pdf. It's 100% likely I'm not using journalctl properly either.

You are giving it the -d flag. -d means "detached." There are logs, you are just preventing yourself from seeing them.
Replace the -d with an -i (for interactive) and try again.
Have you completed the podman rootless setup in order to be able to use it? You may need to edit /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid to get containers to run:
https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md#etcsubuid-and-etcsubgid-configuration
More than likely, this might have something to do with podman being unprivileged, and this wanting to bind to port 80 in the container (a privileged port). You may need to specify a --userns flag to podman.
Running in interactive mode will give you the logs you want and will hopefully point you in the right direction.
- I didn't know enough to try running it interactively - that was a great suggestion and showed many access denied errors trying to access a log file path, so thanks for that suggestion.
- Interesting, it runs if I remove the mount points. It's binding to port 8080, so nothing to do with privileged ports here. I'll need to look into the subuid and subgid edits - I read the docs for those and understood them to be for multiple users on the same machine running the same container, didn't realize it was for all users including my own but that makes sense. Thanks for the direction!

just curious; why would you like to use podman over docker? I have a lot of docker containers running, wondering if I should switch to podman.
- No daemon needed, better security because of rootless approach, but well docker also runs rootless nowadays. Podman came up from frustration from Red Hat over docker, that’s why they developed their own thing. Afaik it is nearly full compatible and can be used as a drop in replacement for docker.
  
  interesting! So I should be able to throw my docker-compose yamls directly at Podman and be good to go?
- A couple of reasons - I switched from Pop! OS to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and the Docker version in the repository is 24.07 compared to 25.02 (the current version of Docker) with the official Docker site only supporting SLES on s390x, not Tumbleweed on x86_64. The main reason though is that it can run without root which is appealing; apparently I have a lot to learn on setting that up. The glib statements of 'drop in replacement' that I"ve seen isn't quite accurate apparently outside of the commandline options.

 undefined

    
podman logs [container id]

What exit code shows when you execute podman ps -a?
- Thanks - this shows exited (1). Running in foreground mode from another suggestion shows the same access denied and file not found error repeatedly - 'Suppressed: java.io.FileNotFoundException: logs/info.log (Permission denied). Looks like I don't have podman configured correctly, going to work through that.

Does it run in the foreground? It works for me if I run podman run -it --rm docker.io/frooodle/s-pdf:latest. Maybe it's something with the application itself and some data in those mount points?
- Looks like it is the mount points; if I remove those it runs. Going to follow @ubergeek77's suggestion. (Does tagging with @ work on Lemmy?)

19 comments