Store and run containers and VM from an external drive

[anarchy89]

Feature request description

Is it possible to store and run podman containers and VM from an external drive on mac m1? I only have 256gb of storage and use an external APFS SSD.

Suggest potential solution

Either to be able to create a symlink to a folder in an external drive, or change a variable in the program to do it.

Have you considered any alternatives?

Just symlinking but not sure what or if it's possible.

Additional context

Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

[github-actions[bot]]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[rhatdan]

You should be able to configure containers.conf to setup the storage drive to be volume mounted into the container.
@baude @ashley-cui Please confirm

[anarchy89]

@rhatdan any updates?

[rhatdan]

In containers.conf on the MAC, you should see

Host directories to be mounted as volumes into the VM by default.

Environment variables like $HOME as well as complete paths are supported for

the source and destination. An optional third field :ro can be used to

tell the container engines to mount the volume readonly.

#volumes = [

"$HOME:$HOME",

#]

You can extend this file to modify the volumes line to include volumes outside of $HOME into the VM, and then these could be used by the container.

[anarchy89]

i cant find the storage.conf file in macos.

https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/vendor/github.com/containers/storage/storage.conf

the containers.conf file has no volumes section. not sure what you mean.

[kolonelkrazy]

rootless (running under specific file)

run podman info, under storage section you'll see the needed information including the storage.conf file

rootfull

same deal, but it will show you the info for the root account

store:
  configFile: /home/kolonelkrazy/.config/containers/storage.conf
  containerStore:
    number: 0
    paused: 0
    running: 0
    stopped: 0
  graphDriverName: overlay
  graphOptions: {}
  graphRoot: /home/kolonelkrazy/.local/share/containers/storage
  graphRootAllocated: 
  graphRootUsed: 
  graphStatus:
    Backing Filesystem: 
    Native Overlay Diff: "false"
    Supports d_type: "true"
    Supports shifting: "true"
    Supports volatile: "true"
    Using metacopy: "false"
  imageCopyTmpDir: /var/tmp
  imageStore:
    number: 236
  runRoot: /run/user/3056/containers
  transientStore: false
  volumePath: /home/kolonelkrazy/.local/share/containers/storage/volumes

[kolonelkrazy]

To do this without any changes to podman:

1. Run podman info under the user intended to run the container
2. Find store --> graphRoot under the output
   a. if running rootless it's usually /home/$USER/.local/share/containers/storage
   b. if rootful it's usually /var/lib/containers/storage
3. use typical device mounting strategies to mount right over that directory mount /dev/my/partition /home/$USER/.local/share/containers/storage

Take a look at the /home/$USER/.local/share/containers/storage to see if this suites your usecase, there are many things stored in that folder including secrets and network defs. I prefer to do it this way so everything needed for my container is kept together on a secondary drive