Documentation unclear regarding Podman configuration files on Windows

[hansmbakker]

This issue was posted before (#17644); however it was closed without a solution.

The suggestion to look in the man pages did not solve the issue because it is not documented there.
See https://github.com/podman-container-tools/container-libs/blob/main/common/docs/containers.conf.5.md

The question is still: how to properly configure podman using a configuration file on Windows?

I added the configuration file below to %APPDATA%\Roaming\containers\containers.conf.d and it does not seem to be picked up.

1-userns-keep-id.conf

[containers]
userns = "keep-id"

I wanted to add this setting as a configuration file instead of as runArgs setting in my devcontainer.json files to prevent breaking their compatibility with docker.

[Luap99]

What podman version are you using? (AS a general rule it would be great to follow the bug template when reporting issues to providse the infos there)

Most options must be set server side so inside the VM. That said since this is a common problem starting with podman 6 the machine will mount the hosts config dir %APPDATA%\containers\ into the VM at /etc/containers so at that point you can edit it there on the host.

https://github.com/podman-container-tools/container-libs/blob/main/common/docs/containers-config.5.md

Not sure where Roaming there comes from but that path was never used AFAICT.

[hansmbakker]

So there are 2 issues here:

• the man-page I referenced is unclear for windows. This is version-independent and did not fit well in the bug template
• the .conf functionality does not work as expected. I created .conf file is not picked up from %APPDATA%\containers\containers.conf.d folder on Windows #29239 for that

[sahithicinchalapu]

/assign

[sahithicinchalapu]

I opened a documentation PR in container-libs to clarify the Windows configuration paths and podman machine behavior.

podman-container-tools/container-libs#1041