can't run pgadmin4 from a readonly image repository

[marcelgsteiger]

I'm running image pgadmin4:9.17 on arm64 using rootless podman. Everything works fine as long as the image is pulled to the local user's repo with r/w access, then run from there.

But, when the image gets pulled separately and then resides on a local read-only repository, the start of pgadmin4 fails.

I noted that the application writes some values passed via env variables into the /pgadmin4/config_distro.py file. But even when I create this file in a writeable directory and map it into the container, the start fails.

In addition to this file, there are several __pycache__ directories that need write access; but redirecting these to a writable location using the PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX environment variable still is not sufficient to make it work.

Steps to reproduce

1. enable a readonly additional image repository in ~/.config/containers/storage.conf:

[storage]
driver = "overlay"

[storage.options]
additionalimagestores = [ "/var/lib/images",]

[storage.options.overlay]
mount_program = "/usr/bin/fuse-overlayfs"

2. create the corresponding directory /var/lib/images

3. as a user with sudo privileges and write access to the image store, pull the image and give rx access to everyone:

podman --root /var/lib/images pull docker.io/dpage/pgadmin4:9.17
sudo chmod -R a+rx /var/lib/images/

4. Log in as a normal user and verify that the repo is readonly:

podman images
REPOSITORY                 TAG           IMAGE ID      CREATED       SIZE        R/O
docker.io/dpage/pgadmin4   9.17         0fce196477df  41 hours ago  562 MB      true

5. start the container as usual

Expected behavior
container starts normally

Error message

/entrypoint.sh: line 163: /pgadmin4/config_distro.py: Permission denied # this error disappears when config_distro.py is mapped to a writeable file
/entrypoint.sh: line 188: /pgadmin4/config_distro.py: Permission denied # this error disappears when config_distro.py is mapped to a writeable file
/entrypoint.sh: line 346: /venv/bin/python3-cap: Value too large for data type # this error appears even when config_distro.py is mapped to a writeable file and PYTHONPYCACHEPREFIX redirects to another directory.

Environment

Linux myhost 6.18.34+rpt-rpi-2712 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.18.34-1+rpt1 (2026-06-09) aarch64 GNU/Linux
podman version 5.4.2