PSA for anyone having issues where buildah and podman image lists aren't the same

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I had thought this was just me, until BabyWogue and someone else had the same issue.

Basically, if any of these happen:

  • fedora-toolbox create mysteriously fails, and if you run it with --verbose, you see it’s failing to find the fedora-toolbox-$USER container.
  • You make a new image with buildah, but it doesn’t appear in podman.

You may eligible for compensa—wait, wrong storyboard.

What’s essentially happened is that new buildah versions use fuse-overlayfs as their rootless storage backend, but if you already had podman, it’ll use the vfs backend that was automatically set in ~/.config/containers/storage.conf (no clue why exactly buildah does one thing and podman another).

Now…I’m not quite sure how to 100% why this happens. However, I put this in ~/.config/containers/storage.conf:

[storage]
  driver = "overlay"
  runroot = "/run/user/UID"
  graphroot = "/var/home/USER/.local/share/containers/storage"
  [storage.options]
    mount_program = "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs"

replacing USER with the username and UID with the uid (id -u).

I also deleted the entire contents ~/.local/share/containers, since I didn’t need the old vfs containers anyway. If you run into issues, try that.

~~Now here’s the sucky part: it doesn’t necessarily work for everyone. With BabyWogue, it seems to fail …~

EDIT: This was due to an unrelated reason, the config file actually works.

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