Podman exits immediately

Hi
I am using Fedora-35 Workstation edition. My podman is not working fine. I am able to run commands like podman pull correctly. The Toolbx command toolbox which is based on podman is also working correctly. But when I try to start a bash shell in a container, I am not getting an interactive terminal. The command I am using:

podman run -i -t docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest /bin/bash

I expected to see an interactive bash terminal running inside the container. But podman exits immediately! ? I checked the logs (using journalctl -r | grep podman and I get

container cleanup 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)
container died 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)
container attach 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)
container start 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)
container init 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)
image pull  docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest
container create 793 (image=docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest, name=flamboyant_gagarin)

I have truncated the journalctl output to show that the container inits, starts, attaches and then died! Am I doing something wrong? I remember such command working correctly in the past…

Maybe try podman --log-level=debug run -i -t docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest /bin/bash

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Works just fine here:

$ podman run -ti ubuntu:latest /bin/bash
Resolved "ubuntu" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/000-shortnames.conf)
Trying to pull docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob ea362f368469 done  
Copying config d13c942271 done  
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
root@2f3c44d1b022:/# ls
bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib32  lib64  libx32  media  mnt  opt  proc  root  run  sbin  srv  sys  tmp  usr  var
root@2f3c44d1b022:/# exit

So it’s probably an issue specific to your system. The debug info should help us narrow down what’s causing it.

2 Likes

Thank you @ankursinha for verifying that it is not a bug in Fedora but an issue on my system.

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Thank you for @qulogic for the debug command.

I tried it yesterday but did not get time to read the debug log carefully to identify the problem. Today, the same command is working fine! I don’t know for sure what has changed. I have installed some updates today, restarted my machine a couple of times. Yesterday I was also doing some terminal kung-fu (chmod, chown etc. to solve some other issue). Maybe I made some mistakes, that got fixed automatically :man_shrugging:

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Did you just install? You need to log out and back in again at least, so that your user is in the right groups and subuids.

@qulogic No. I had Toolbx installed for a long time. So podman was also installed as a dependency quite some time back. I only used podman directly on Fedora 35 for the first time when I got the issue.

1 Like