Why rootless podman errors with "ERRO[0000] stat : no such file or directory" ?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
  • podman

Issue

  • Rootless user runs into the following error when running any podman command
$ podman ps
ERRO[0000] stat /run/user/xxxx: no such file or directory

Resolution

  • This error is a result of the runRoot of the user is either missing or removed.
  • Run $ env | grep XDG_RUNTIME_DIRand confirm if the directory is present in the host(XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is an env variable that corresponds to runRoot of the user).
  • If absent, this directory needs to be created and assigned permissions $USER:$USER(where USER is the name of the rootless user) so that necessary permissions are assigned for the runRoot directory.

Root Cause

  • runRoot directory for the user is removed/missing from the host.

Diagnostic Steps

  • runRoot of a user can be found from $podman info| grep runRoot. If this directory is absent/removed, it leads to error since the user is unable to write to this location.
# podman info| grep runRoot
  runRoot: /run/containers/storage

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