Weekly Journal 115 - Podman, Ansible

Podman and Ansible

While building an Ansible environment to run my dotfile management playbooks I ran into a file permissions issue when running Ansible in a container. I’ve been experimenting with Podman Desktop as a replacement for Docker Desktop and it apparently has some issues with file permissions and mounted volumes. While executing my test playbook, Ansible attempted to run a chmod command on the host volume and it failed with a permissions error. Apparently this is a known issue with Podman and mounted volumes. I’m not sure if this related to Podman running without root permissions, or if this is because I’m running Podman on Windows against an NTFS volume.

Unfortunately I haven’t found a workaround, so I am going to switch to setting up a local Python virtual environment using venv. Once I have the initial playbooks developed I plan on revisiting the use of a container as I like the idea of managing my Ansible toolchain in a container instead of on my host system.