Is VS Code documentation for podman out of date now?

[gtusr]

In light of this article from Dan Walsh on how to run podman from inside podman, is it no longer the case that podman cannot be used as a drop-in replacement for docker in VSCode when cloning a repository inside a devcontainer's volume mount?

[rhatdan]

I see no reason that it could not be done.

[gtusr]

Thanks. I've recommended to Microsoft that they update their documentation by removing the unnecessary warning.

[lrowe]

Which parts of the current docs at https://code.visualstudio.com/remote/advancedcontainers/docker-options#_podman are unnecessary?

To work around issues with rootless Podman (for example, not respecting a non-root "remoteUser" and trying to install the server in root), you can set the following:

"runArgs": [
"--userns=keep-id"
],
"containerEnv": {
"HOME": "/home/node"
}

Trying to run the Node sample container with Dev Containers: Try a Dev Container Sample... (see: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/tutorial) with podman-docker and podman 4.9.3 installed from the Ubuntu 24.04 packages without the above change to the devcontainer.json gives the following error:

[7115 ms] Command failed: docker volume ls -q
[7115 ms] Emulate Docker CLI using podman. Create /etc/containers/nodocker to quiet msg.
Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Get "http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.24/volumes": dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied
[7115 ms] Exit code 1
[17191 ms] Container server terminated (code: 137, signal: null).

I also tried adding just:

"runArgs": [
  "--security-opt=label:disabled"
],

This got a little further but then fails with:

[32289 ms] Start: Run in container: mkdir -p '/root/.vscode-server/bin' && ln -snf '/vscode/vscode-server/bin/linux-x64/f1e16e1e6214d7c44d078b1f0607b2388f29d729' '/root/.vscode-server/bin/f1e16e1e6214d7c44d078b1f0607b2388f29d729'
[32335 ms] 
[32336 ms] mkdir: cannot create directory '/root': Permission denied
[32336 ms] Exit code 1
[32343 ms] Command in container failed: mkdir -p '/root/.vscode-server/bin' && ln -snf '/vscode/vscode-server/bin/linux-x64/f1e16e1e6214d7c44d078b1f0607b2388f29d729' '/root/.vscode-server/bin/f1e16e1e6214d7c44d078b1f0607b2388f29d729'
[32343 ms] mkdir: cannot create directory '/root': Permission denied
[32343 ms] Exit code 1

Is this fixed for you with podman 5? (Still trying to work out how to install that version on my ubuntu box.) It'd be great if podman were able to function as a truly drop-in replacement here so it could work without manually tweaking the devcontainer.json each time.

[lrowe]

Trying with Podman 5.1.2 on Mac installed with homebrew and with the docker shim script in my path, I see the same errors. (I did need to change "--security-opt=label:disabled" to "--security-opt=label:disable".)