How do you guys deal with volume permissions in rootless mode in the development environment?

[midnight-wonderer]

My Setup

I am on an Ubuntu host machine running containerd in rootless mode.
My objective is to develop an application by editing code using IDEs on the host machine, so I have created a compose.yaml file to be used with nerdctl compose, mounting host directories into the container.

The Issue

• The mounted volume is mapped from the current user's ID on the host machine to 0 (root) in the container.
• If I run the container with users other than root, the mounted volume becomes unwritable because the owner is root. This is problematic for files like package-lock.json, which must be writable by npm.

My Current Solution

• I am running the container as root only during development, so the mounted volume remains writable.
• ChatGPT recommended against this approach but did not provide better solutions.

What I Liked

In Lima, they use reverse-sshfs; everything works seamlessly, including inotify, and the owner is mapped correctly without disrupting the host machine. Unfortunately, I can't use Lima because I don't have dedicated memory for it; my RAM is insufficient and it's too heavy-weight for my setup.

Questions

How do you handle your situation? Do you run containers as root, or do you use other methods?

[Bohooslav]

So how did you go around that?

[midnight-wonderer]

Due to a lack of alternatives, I'm currently using the root user during development and shipping non-root containers to production.
This aligns file ownership with the host filesystem, as the container's root UID maps to the current user's UID on the host.

[Bohooslav]

I ended up using host directories instead of named volumes, and it works.