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Linux Troubleshooting

This purpose of this page is to outline any known issues with using devpod on Linux and provide known workarounds / fixes.

File permission issues when using a local directory and a remoteUser (or containerUser)​

When up'ing a workspace using a local directory, that also specifies a remote container user (via devcontainer.json), the ownership of the directory will change to the remote user. Since this remote user is in a different user namespace, the ownership will appear as a unknown user. To fix this, simply chown the directory back to the local user, such as sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP .. The reason this is neccesary is by default, when a new user is created by the container runtime, such as docker, all files from the host file system will be owned by root during the overlay. For your dev environment to be useful remotely, DevPod needs to chown the workspace to the remote user. Once the workspace has stopped, you need to change the ownership back. In general local direcotories are typically used for development, once the devcontainer is working it is better to push the workspace to a git repo and use this.

Using FISH shell​

Custom configurations in config.fish file run every time a fish -c command is called, so this processes somewhat get on the way of devpod agent workspace up.

The solution is to move the customizations inside the if status is-interactive case.

From this

if status is-interactive
    # Commands to run in interactive sessions can go here
end
eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

# customizations

to this

if status is-interactive
    # Commands to run in interactive sessions can go here
    eval "$(/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/brew shellenv)"
    
    # customizations
end

Using SELinux​

If you are running SELinux and try to start a workspace with a mounted volume, you may recieve a "Permission Denied" even if the ownership of the files are correct. To resolve append :Z to your volume definitions, like so

{
    // some fields

    "workspaceMount": "",
    "workspaceFolder": "/workspaces/${localWorkspaceFolderBasename}",
    "runArgs": [
        // other args
        "--volume=${localWorkspaceFolder}:/workspaces/${localWorkspaceFolderBasename}:Z"
    ]
}