Last week, while setting up a Fedora 33 system, I thought of running the SecureDrop development container there, but using podman instead of the Docker setup we have.

I tried to make minimal changes to our existing scripts. Added a ~/bin/docker file, with podman $@ inside (and the sha-bang line).

Next, I provided the proper label for SELinux:

sudo chcon -Rt container_file_t securedrop

The SecureDrop container runs as the normal user inside of the Docker container. I can not do the same here as the filesystem gets mounted as root, and I can not write in it. So, had to modify one line in the bash script, and also disabled another function call which deletes the /dev/random file inside of the container.

diff --git a/securedrop/bin/dev-shell b/securedrop/bin/dev-shell
index ef424bc01..37215b551 100755
--- a/securedrop/bin/dev-shell
+++ b/securedrop/bin/dev-shell
@@ -72,7 +72,7 @@ function docker_run() {
            -e LANG=C.UTF-8 \
            -e PAGE_LAYOUT_LOCALES \
            -e PATH \
-           --user "${USER:-root}" \
+           --user root \
            --volume "${TOPLEVEL}:${TOPLEVEL}" \
            --workdir "${TOPLEVEL}/securedrop" \
            --name "${SD_CONTAINER}" \
diff --git a/securedrop/bin/run b/securedrop/bin/run
index e82cc6320..0c11aa8db 100755
--- a/securedrop/bin/run
+++ b/securedrop/bin/run
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ cd "${REPOROOT}/securedrop"
 source "${BASH_SOURCE%/*}/dev-deps"
 
 run_redis &
-urandom
+#urandom
 run_sass --watch &
 maybe_create_config_py
 reset_demo

This time I felt that build time for verifying each cached layer is much longer than what it used to be for podman. Maybe I am just mistaken. The SecureDrop web application is working very fine inside.

Package build containers

We also use containers to build Debian packages. And those molecule scenarios were failing as ansible.posix.synchronize module could not sync to a podman container. I asked if there is anyway to do that, and by the time I woke up, Adam Miller had a branch that fixed the issue. I directly used the same in my virtual environment. The package build was successful. Then, the testinfra tests failed due as it could not create the temporary directory inside of the container. I already opened an issue for the same.