How to change environment variable of an existing container

[1player]

I have a container which I would really like not to recreate with a custom --env option.

Is there a way for me to change a container's environment option without having to recreate it?

[rhatdan]

No, you have to clone it.

[cdoern]

This is an interesting one because container clone so far has only been additive, it doesn't really allow subtracting pieces.

Seems like a good potential usecase for podman generate spec?

technically you can "replace" stuff with container clone, like you can do --cpus=4 instead of --cpus-5 so this could just be a more extreme version of replacing a config entity.

I could see this being applicable to both clone and generate spec

[rhatdan]

We do have --unsetenv?

[rhatdan]

Although this does not work the way I was hoping.
$ podman run --env=apple=orange --unsetenv apple fedora printenv apple
orange

[1player]

Honestly my issue is that this is a pet container, i.e. I don't want to lose any data, if possible. I know how it's been created (I can get all the details with a podman generate systemd --new), so if there's a way of exporting a tarball of its contents, creating a new one with a different set of --env options and reimporting the tarball, I can try that.

Can podman export help?

[rhatdan]

You could commit the container to an image and then create a new container off of the image.