RHEL change container storage location

The storage location where images are stored for standard users images are typically in $HOME/.local/share/containers/storage/.
In some cases it can be useful to change this location.

To override the location of the folder containing the images create and edit the following file:

nano ~/.config/containers/storage.conf 

Copy/Paste the following adapting the graphroot parameter to point to the desired folder. In the below example the images will be stored in /share/containers/storage.

[storage]
  graphroot = "/share/containers/storage"

Modification of theses parameters requires a reset of the podman service. Run the following command as root:

podman system reset

To validate the change please run the following command:

podman info | grep "graphRoot:"

As mentioned when updating the location it is necessary to ensure that the SELinux labeling is correct for the updated location.

All following commands are to be executed as root.

First, clean-up and re-create the necessary folder structure. In the following commands the graphroot path is configured to be /share/containers/storage. Please adapt to your context.

sudo rm -rf /share/containers/
mkdir -p /share/containers

Second, update the ownership of the folder to correspond to the user running podman. In the following case the local user is radiantlogic.

chown radiantlogic:radiantlogic /share/containers
chmod go-rwx /share/containers

Third, update the SELinx configuration

semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay-images(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay-layers(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay2(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay2-images(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_ro_file_t "/share/containers/storage/overlay2-layers(/.*)?"
semanage fcontext -a -s unconfined_u -t container_file_t "/share/containers/storage/volumes/[^/]*/.*"
restorecon -R -v /share/containers
sudo semanage fcontext -a -e /var/lib/containers /share/containers
restorecon -R -v /share/containers

Finally, reset podman for the changes to apply:

podman system reset

To validate the changes you can use the following commands to read the policies:

sudo semanage fcontext -l

or to limit on the desired folder:

sudo semanage fcontext -l | grep /share/containers

To clean up old policies, the following command can be used as root. Theses commands delete the policies for a given path.

sudo semanage fcontext -D "/share/containers/storage/overlay(/.*)?"

For more information please refer to https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating-systems/oracle-linux/podman/podman-ConfiguringStorageforPodman.html#podman-containers-mounts.