When I run the compose file with bind mount ./data and no :Z label I get these results:

ls -la yields the currently logged in user as owner of the data directory.

podman unshare ls -la yields root as owner of the data directory.

So do you think this is the basis of the problem?

I checked the tutorial and setting the private label :Z worked when using $HOME/… as bind mount. For named volumes from podman itself that was not necessary, it worked out of the box.

Like I said the dev used bind mounts so I sticked with that but he was probably using docker so he didn’t have this problem.

This solved it when using a bind mount! The other option is using named volumes which also works without errors.

On a different note, can I ask you where you learned about Quadlets. It seems the tutorials are still very sparse.

With the getenfore command from kumi below I get Enforcing so I guess I use SELinux.

I now have two working options. a) Using named volumes (I’m still unsure if this is the way to go or not, generally speaking) and b) using the private label :Z for the bind mount.

Without :Z podman unshare yields root:root for the data directory. After setting the label it is a different user alltogether.

getenforce gives me Enforcing. And I think I have SELinux. I had a look at this tutorial https://www.tutorialworks.com/podman-rootless-volumes/ suggested by another commenter and after running podman unshare ls -al in the folder with the bind mount it returns root root as the owner of the directory. So as far as I understand this means for the podman namespace this folder belongs to root? Like I said in my edit using named volumes solved the issue in on way. I just tried the :Z label too and it seems to work too. So it was probably a SELinux issue?

I was unsure if I installed docker on this machine so I ran docker-compose and the help page showed up (another one than for podman-compose). Then I queried my installed packages and grepped them for docker and nothing shows up. Only podman-compose has docker in the description. So I accidentaly used that compatibility layer already without knowing.

But one reason I consider to switch is because compose files are not really standardized I heard and quadlets are structured like systemd files so I seems more applicable. But that is still a long way.

I went on and tried something else and when using named volumes (the dev uses bind mounts in his compose file) everything works without errors.

I tried to use named volumes and now everything works fine, weird.