Hey everyone! I'm trying to find a solution to a really confusing problem...

I have the following simple nginx docker compose configuration on my Fedora home server that I can run without issue on my uid 1000 user, lets call this user "userA".

services:
  nginx:
    container_name: nginx-alt
    image: docker.io/library/nginx
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8181:80

This exposes internal port 80 as 8181 and can be accessed in a lan in the expected matter.

However, for security reasons, I want to actually host this service eventually on a completely different user with less permissions. Let's call this user "userB" who has a very limited scope of the file system. This is to prevent potential escaping of the rootless container causing major file system havoc (i.e. reduce the scope of the user to a very limited network of containers.)

The problem is really simple: For some reason, when userB runs this service (uid 1001), the nginx service suddenly complains about privileges. As a result, I get a "Forbidden 403" error when hosting. Turning off selinux has no affect (so setenforce 0 does nothing, meaning I can rule out secure linux interruption.)

The errors look like the following:

nginx-alt  | 2026/09/04 20:03:34 [error] 25#25: *1 "/usr/share/nginx/html/index.html" is forbidden (13: Permission denied), client: xx.xx.x.x, server: localhost, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8181"
nginx-alt  | 10.89.0.2 - - [04/Sep/2026:20:03:34 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 403 153 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:155.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/155.0" "-"

For what it's worth, both users should be relatively vanilla and all ports are appropriately exported. There shouldn't be anything, for example, that is making userA run as "privileged" over the other users and podman should be running rootless in both containers.

I did see a note on the nginx image about running in rootless that I might try, but it doesn't solve my bigger issue here which is the lack of consistency between the two users. Additionally, userns_mode: keep-ids only caused the container to fail to boot for other reason entirely.

There must be something fundamentally wrong with my configuration of my system. Has anyone had any experience running two podman containers on two different users simultaneously that can provide feedback?

Obviously, I'm not trying to run just an nginx server, but I found this to be the easiest configuration to reproduce.

Try running it with either plan podman or podman quadlets

I do exactly what you describe - run multiple containers as various unprivileged service users simultaneously - and haven't had an issue doing it. The only thing that tripped me up was that I initially didn't realize that the service users needed to have a home directory created. I thought the service users wouldn't have a need for a home directory since they were single-purpose, but it turns out podman requires it to function, and if you try to run it as a user without one, it will fail to start in weird ways. Is there any chance that is the source of your issue?

Does the new user "userB" belong to the same set of groups as the old user "userA"?

More details here: https://serverfault.com/questions/947301/nginx-displaying-failed-13-permission-denied-when-trying-to-access-new-site

Basically:

1. Check user permissions on the public directory -> You said userA and userB both have access.
2. Check that the new userB belongs to a group with rx access to the public directory for the website.