localstack status permission

I ran into an issue where I was unable to ask localstack for its status. I would run the command and it would tell me that it didn’t have permission to read files from my own home directory. Let’s fix it

The issue #

I would run this to ask for the status.

localstack status

And get this error

PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/waylon/.cache/localstack/image_metadata'

What happened #

It dawned on me that the first time I ran localstack was straight docker, not the python cli. When docker runs it typically runs as root unless the Dockerfile sets up a user and group for it.

How to fix it #

If you have sudo access to the machine you are on you can recursively change ownership to your user and group. I chose to just give myself ownership of my whole ~/.cache directory you could choose a deeper directory if you want. I feel pretty safe giving myself ownership to my own cache directory on my own machine.

whoami
# waylon

chown -R waylon:waylon ~/.cache

Now it’s working #

Running localstack status now gives me a nice status message rather than an error.

❯ localstack status
┌─────────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Runtime version │ 1.2.1.dev                                             │
│ Docker image    │ tag: latest, id: dbbfe0ce0008, 📆 2022-10-15T00:51:03 │
│ Runtime status  │ ✖ stopped                                             │
└─────────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘