When lance-data-viewer runs as UID 1001 (the default non-root user) and mounts a volume where .lance files were written by a different UID (e.g., 1000 from an Airflow or application container), the error is:
LanceError(IO): Generic LocalFileSystem error: Unable to open file /data/imag...
The message is truncated and doesn't indicate that the root cause is a permission denial. This is a common scenario when running lance-data-viewer alongside other containers in Docker Compose.
Proposed improvements:
- Catch permission errors explicitly and return a user-friendly message including the current UID and the file owner UID
- Add a startup check: after connecting to
DATA_PATH, attempt to read a sample file and log a warning if permissions are insufficient, rather than failing silently per-dataset
- Add a troubleshooting note to the README about volume permissions when sharing data between containers
When lance-data-viewer runs as UID 1001 (the default non-root user) and mounts a volume where
.lancefiles were written by a different UID (e.g., 1000 from an Airflow or application container), the error is:The message is truncated and doesn't indicate that the root cause is a permission denial. This is a common scenario when running lance-data-viewer alongside other containers in Docker Compose.
Proposed improvements:
DATA_PATH, attempt to read a sample file and log a warning if permissions are insufficient, rather than failing silently per-dataset