www-data user cannot access a Virtualbox shared folder through Docker container - docker

I have an Ubuntu server VM running on a Windows 10 host, where a folder on an external hard drive is passed through to the VM at the mountpoint /NextCloudStorage. I can access this folder from my normal user, and from root, by adding my normal user to the vboxsf user group.
My Docker Compose file includes this to pass through the /NextCloudStorage to the container:
volumes:
- nextcloud:/var/www/html
- .:/code
- /NextCloudStorage:/NextCloudStorage
When using docker exec -it nextcloud-app-1 bash, I can interact with the shared folder live using commands such as cd /NextCloudStorage, mkdir test1, etc.
My problem is that the application running in the container cannot access this folder, because it runs as www-data. ls commands list the folder as empty, and when trying to create an item in the folder I get the error "permission denied".
Does anyone know how to give the www-data user access to this shared folder?
Sorry for the long post but I had to spiel it out!
Thanks!

You could try to add the www-data user to the vboxsf group
To achieve this we need to figure out the group id. In the virtual machine run
cat /etc/group
You will see something like this
Then in your container, if this group doesnt exist create it
In this case the gid we need to use is 115
groupadd --gid 115 vboxsf
Next add this group to your www-data user
usermod -aG vboxsf www-data
Update:
Try to run the following command as root in the container
chmod -R 777 /NextCloudStorage

Related

Bind mounts created using rootless docker have a weird uid on the host machine. How can I delete these folders?

I have the following docker-compose.yml file which creates a bind mount located in $HOME/test on the host system:
version: '3.8'
services:
pg:
image: postgres:13
volumes:
- $HOME/test:/var/lib/postgresql/data
environment:
- POSTGRES_USER=postgres
- POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pass
- PGUSER=postgres
I bring up the container and inspect the permissions of the bind mount directory:
$ docker-compose up -d
$ ls -l ~
drwx------ 19 4688518 usertest 4096 Mar 11 17:06 test
The folder ~/test is created with a different uid in order to prevent accidental manipulation of this folder outside of the container. But what if I really do want to manipulate it? For example, if I try to delete the folder, I get a permission denied error as expected:
$ rm ~/test -rf
rm: cannot remove '/home/usertest/test': Permission denied
I suspect that I need to change uids using the newuidmap command somehow, but I'm not sure how to go about that.
How can I delete these folders?
But what if I really do want to manipulate it?
Using Docker, you can:
Run a command in the container as a specific user using the same UID (such as rm or sh), for example:
# Run shell session using your user with docker-compose
# You can then easily manipulate data
docker-compose exec -u 4688518 pg sh
# Run command directly with docker
# Docker container name may vary depending on your situation
# Use docker ps to see real container name
docker exec -it -u 4688518 stack_pg_1 rm -rf /var/lib/postgresql/data
Similar to previous one, you can run a new container with:
# Will run sh by default
docker run -it -u 4688518 -v $HOME/test:/tmp/test busybox
# You can directly delete data with
docker run -it -u 4688518 -v $HOME/test:/tmp/test busybox rm -rf /tmp/test/*
This may be suitable if your pg container is stopped or deleted. Docker image itself does not need to be the same as the one run by Docker Compose, you only need to specify proper user UID.
Note: you may not be able to delete folder using rm -rf /tmp/test as user 4688518 may not have writing permission on /tmp folder to do so, hence the use of /tmp/test/*
Use any of the above, but using root user such as -u 0 or -u root
Without using Docker, you can effectively run sudo command as suggested by other answer, or even temporarily change permission of said folder then change it back. However, from experience, when manipulating Docker-related data it's easier and less error-prone to user Docker itself.
Dealing with user ids in docker is tricky business because docker containers share the same kernel with the host operating system (at least on linux). Consequently, any files that the container creates in the bind mount with a given uid will have the same uid on the host system.
Whenever the uid used by the container (let's say it's 2222) is different from your own uid (or you don't have write access to files owned by 2222), you won't be able to delete the folder. The easy workaround is to run sudo rm -rf ~/test.
Edit: If the user does not have admin rights, you can still give them rights to modify the generated files like so.
# Create a directory that the users can write in.
mkdir workspace
# Change the owner to the group of users that should have access (3333).
sudo chown -R 2222:3333 workspace
# Give group write access.
sudo chmod -R g+w workspace
# Make sure that all users that should have write access are in group 3333.
Then you can run the container using
docker run --rm -u `id -u`:3333 -v `pwd`/workspace:/workspace \
-w /workspace alpine:latest touch myfile
which creates myfile in the workspace folder with the right permissions so your users can delete the file again.

How to launch container with user namespace configuration?

In the below docker file, base image(jenkins/jenkins) is providing a user jenkins with UID 1000 and GID 1000, within container.
FROM jenkins/jenkins
# Install some base packages
# Use non-privileged user provided by base image
USER jenkins # with uid 1000 and GID 1000
# Copy plugins and other stuff
On the docker host(EC2 instance), we also have similar UID & GID created,
$ groupadd -g 1000 jenkins
$ useradd -u 1000 -g jenkins jenkins
$ mkdir -p /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins
$ chown -R jenkins:jenkins /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins
to make sure, container can write files to /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins in EC2 instance.
Another aspect that we need to take care in same EC2 instance, is to run containers(other than above container) to run in non-privileged mode.
So, below configuration is performed on docker host(EC2):
$ echo dockremap:165536:65536 > /etc/subuid
$ echo dockremap:165536:65536 > /etc/subgid
$ echo '{"debug":true, "userns-remap":"default"}' > /etc/docker/daemon.json
This dockremap configuration is not allowing jenkins to start and docker container goes in Exited state:
$ ls -l /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins
total 0
After removing docker remap configuration, everything work fine.
Why dockremap configuration not allow the jenkins container to run as jenkins user?
I'm actually fighting with this because it seems not very portable but this is the best I found. As said above on your docker host the UID/GID are the ones from the container + the value in /etc/subuid & /etc/subgid.
So your "container root" is 165536 on your host and your user jenkins is 166536 (165536 + 1000).
To come back to your example what you need to do is
$ mkdir -p /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins
$ chown -R 166536:166536 /abc/home_folder_for_jenkins
User namespaces offset the UID/GID of the user inside the container, and any files inside the container. There is no mapping from the UID/GID inside the container to the external host UID/GID (that would defeat the purpose). Therefore, you would need the offset the UID/GID of the directory being created, or just use a named volume and let docker handle this for you. I believe that UID/GID on the host would be 166536 (165536 + 1000) (I may have an off by one in there, so try opening the directory permissions if this still fails and see what gets created).

Docker volume and host permissions

When I run a docker image for example like
docker run -v /home/n1/workspace:/root/workspace -it rust:latest bash
and I create a directory in the container like
mkdir /root/workspace/test
It's owned by root on my host machine. Which leads to I have to change the permissions everytime after I turn of the container to be able to operate with that directory.
Is there a way how to tell Docker to handle directories and files from my machine (host machine) point of view under a certain user?
You need to run your application as the same uid inside the container as you do on the host to get file ownership to match. My own solution for this is to start the container as root, adjust the uid of the user inside the container to match the volume mount, and then su to the user to run the app. Scripts for this can be found in this repo: https://github.com/sudo-bmitch/docker-base
The in that repo, the fix-perms script handles the change in uid/gid inside the container, and the entrypoint script has an exec gosu $username "$#" that runs the app as the selected user.
Sure, because Docker uses root as a default user. You should create user in your docker container, switch to that user and then make folder, then you will get them without root permissions on you host machine.
Dockerfile
FROM rust:latest
...
RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash myuser
USER myuser

Mounted folder created as root instead of current user in Docker

trying to mount a volume to my container from the docker run command.
It seems like the folder is always created as root instead of the container user. This makes it so that I'm lacking rights on the folder(cant create or write files for logging).
Doing some testing using this command:
docker run -it --entrypoint /bin/bash -v $PWD/logs:/home/jboss/myhub/logs:rw myImage:latest
If i now do the command: ls -ld /logs i get the result: drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jun 12 13:01 logs/
Here we can see that only the owner has write-rights. And root is the owner.
I would expect(I want) jboss to be the owner of this folder. Or at least that all users have read/write rights given the :rw option in the -v parameter
What am I not understanding here? How can i get it to work like I want?
At the moment, this is a recurring issue with no simple answer.
There are two common approaches I hear of.
First involves chowning the directory before using it.
RUN mkdir -p /home/jboss/myhub/logs ; chown -R jboss:jboss /home/jboss/myhub/logs
USER jboss
In case you need to access the files from your host system with a different user, you can chmod files that your app created inside the container with your jboss user.
$ chmod -R +rw /home/jboss/myhub/logs
The second approach, involves creating the files with appropriate chmod in Dockerfile (or in your host system) before running your application.
$ touch /home/jboss/myhub/logs/app-log.txt
$ touch /home/jboss/myhub/logs/error-log.txt
$ chmod 766 /home/jboss/myhub/logs/app-log.txt
$ chmod 766 /home/jboss/myhub/logs/error-log.txt
There certainly are more ways to achieve this, but I haven't yet heard of any more "native" solutions.
I'd like to find out an easier/more practical approach.
#trust512 has identified the problem correctly and also correctly stated that there are no universally agreed upon "good solutions" to the problem. #trust512 has provided 2 kludgy solutions.
My solutions is not better - just an alternative.
Mount the parent of the volume you are interested in.
For example '/home/user' should be owned by user, but if I create a volume
docker volume create myhome
and mount it like
docker container run --mount type=volume,source=myhome,destination=/home/user ...
then /home/user will be owned by root.
However, if I do it like
docker volume create myhome &&
docker container run --mount type=volume,source=myhome,destination=/home alpine:3.4 mkdir /home/user &&
docker container run --mount type=volume,source=myhome,destination=/home alpine:3.4 chown 1000:1000 /home/user
then when I run
docker container run --mount type=volume,source=myhome,destination=/home ...
then /home/user will have the appropriate owner.

Changing the user's uid in a pre-build docker container (jenkins)

I am new to docker, so if this is a fairly obvious process that I am missing, I do apologize for the dumb question up front.
I am setting up a continuous integration server using the jenkins docker image. I did a docker pull jenkins, and created a user jenkins to allow me to mount the /var/jenkins_home in the container to my host's /var/jenkins_home (also owned by jenkins:jenkins user).
the problem is that the container seems to define the jenkins user with uid 102, but my host has the jenkins user as 1002, so when I run it I get:
docker run --name jenkins -u jenkins -p 8080 -v /var/jenkins_home:/var/jenkins_home jenkins
/usr/local/bin/jenkins.sh: line 25: /var/jenkins_home/copy_reference_file.log: Permission denied
I would simply make the uid for the host's jenkins user be 102 in /etc/passwd, but that uid is already taken by sshd. I think the solution is to change the container to use uid 1002 instead, but I am not sure how.
Edit
Actually, user 102 on the host is messagebus, not sshd.
Please take a look at the docker file I just uploaded:
https://github.com/bdruemen/jenkins-docker-uid-from-volume/blob/master/Dockerfile .
Here the UID is extracted from a mounted volume (host directory), with
stat -c '%u' <VOLUME-PATH>
Then the UID of the container user is changed to the same value with
usermod -u <UID>
This has to be done as root, but then root privileges are dropped with
gosu <USERNAME> <COMMAND>
Everything is done in the ENTRYPOINT, so the real UID is unknown until you run
docker run -d -v <HOST-DIRECTORY>:<VOLUME-PATH> ...
Note that after changing the UID, there might be some other files no longer accessible for the process in the container, so you might need a
chown -R <USERNAME> <SOME-PATH>
before the gosu command.
You can also change the GID, see my answer here
Jenkins in docker with access to host docker
and maybe you want to change both to increase security.
You can simply change the UID in /etc/passwd, assuming that no other user has UID 1002.
You will then need to change the ownership of /var/jenkins_home on your host to UID 1002:
chown -R jenkins /var/jenkins_home
In fact, you don't even need a jenkins user on the host to do this; you can simply run:
chown -R 1002 /var/jenkins_home
This will work even if there is no user with UID 1002 available locally.
Another solution is to build your own docker image, based on the Jenkins image, that has an ENTRYPOINT script that looks something like:
#!/bin/sh
chown -R jenkins /var/jenkins_home
exec "$#"
This will (recursively) chown /var/jenkins_home inside the container to whatever UID is used by the jenkins user (this assumes that your Docker contains is starting as root, which is true unless there was a USER directive in the history of the image).
Update
You can create a new image, based on (FROM ...) the jenkins image, with a Dockerfile that performs the necessary edits to the /etc/passwd file. But that seems a lot of work for not much gain. It's not clear why you're creating jenkins user on the host or if you actually need access to the jenkins home directory on the host.
If all you're doing is providing data persistence, consider using a data volume container and --volumes-from rather than a host volume, because this will isolate the data volume from your host so that UID conflicts don't cause confusion.
I had the same error, I turned SELinux off (on CEntOS) and it works.
Otherwise, it woukd be better to tune SElinux with SEManage commands.
The ideal is to change the user UID in your Dockerfile used by jenkins with the same UID used by the Host (remember that it must be done for non-root users, if root create a new user and configure the service inside the container to that user).
Assuming the user's UID on the host is 1003 and the user is called jenkins (use $id to get the user and group id).
Add to your Dockerfile
# Modifies the user's UID and GID
RUN groupmod -g 1003 jenkins && usermod -u 1003 -g 1003 jenkins
# I use a group (docker) on my host to organize the privileges,
#if that's your # case add the user to this group inside the container.
RUN groupadd -g 998 docker && usermod -aG docker nginx

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