[QST] why is the default user's uid 1000?

[guilhermehartmann]

Any reason why the new containers now have ubuntu user as uid 1000 ?

[jameslamb]

Thanks for using RAPIDS.

When you say "the new containers", could you please be specific about which images you're referring to?

Could you please also tell us if there's some specific reason that the default user having uid 1000 in the images is a problem?

[guilhermehartmann]

I was using a Cuda 12.0 container on vscode devcontainer and the permissions on the disk started failing when the new user ubuntu was added and rapids uid changed to 1001. I was just wondering if this was an intentional move.

[jameslamb]

wondering if this was an intentional move.

I'm not aware of a specific, intentional change to the uid of any users in the images produced here.

But you haven't yet told us which images you're pulling (for example, "a CUDA 12.0 container" doesn't tell us what version of RAPIDS you are using), so I can't say with certainty that nothing changed between whatever image you were using before and whatever image you're using now.

If you want some help here, please provide the following:

• exact logs demonstrating what you mean by "permissions on the disk started failing"
• a docker run command showing us what image(s) you're referring to and how you're using them

If you can provide that, we'd be happy to help more.

[guilhermehartmann]

Hi James

The difference was noticed on the containers :

• nvcr.io/nvidia/rapidsai/base:25.04-cuda12.8-py3.12

$ cat /etc/passwd | egrep 100.:
ubuntu:x:1000:1000:Ubuntu:/home/ubuntu:/bin/bash
rapids:x:1001:1001::/home/rapids:/bin/bash

• nvcr.io/nvidia/rapidsai/base:25.04-cuda12.0-py3.11

$ cat /etc/passwd | egrep 100.:
rapids:x:1000:1000::/home/rapids:/bin/bash

[naamqul]

I was using a Cuda 12.0 container on vscode devcontainer and the permissions on the disk started failing when the new user ubuntu was added and rapids uid changed to 1001. I was just wondering if this was an intentional move.

I'm also having issues writing to my local disk when binding /my/local/workspace:/home/rapids/notebooks. How did you resolve this?

Using the image rapidsai/notebooks:25.10-cuda12-py3.12 within Ubuntu-24.04 (WSL 2)

Edit:

For anyone else with this issue, adding user: "${UID:-1000}:${GID:-1000}" to my compose seems to have resolved things for me.

[cboettig]

Thanks for the ping @jameslamb and for this fantastic resource!

I think it's quite nice that the rapidsai/ci-conda image has a default non-root user (ubuntu) and uses the standard UID/GID for that user (1000:1000), as it matches conventions elsewhere. (e.g. even the default ubuntu image now sets ubuntu as the default user with this UID and GID).

The rapidsai/ci-conda container however creates the conda environment in /opt/conda (again this is great, thanks for not using /home/ubuntu, /opt is much more flexible!) but most of these files are owned by root:conda (the conda gid is 1001). I'd like to propose two changes:

1. Consider adding the ubuntu user to the conda group, which allows them to install into this environment. (This would be nice but not too difficult to solve downstream)

2. While almost all of /opt/conda is root:conda of the files in /opt/conda have permissions assigned to root:root, and thus break installs of certain packages. Changing permissions in derivative dockerfiles effectively duplicates the space use, since layers are immutable in Docker. Here's a summary of affected files:

Image: rapidsai/ci-conda
Date: 2026-01-23

Issue

Most of /opt/conda correctly uses root:conda ownership, but 1,218 directories are owned by root:root instead of root:conda. This can cause permission issues when non-root users in the conda group attempt to modify these paths.

Total size of affected directories: ~213 MB

Affected Paths by Size

Size	Path
57M	/opt/conda/lib/perl5
38M	/opt/conda/share/doc
19M	/opt/conda/libexec/git-core
9.6M	/opt/conda/etc/conda/test-files
4.2M	/opt/conda/include/LIEF
1.1M	/opt/conda/share/gettext
88K	/opt/conda/share/git-core

Packages Likely Responsible

Based on the paths, these conda packages appear to install directories with incorrect group:

• git
• perl
• gettext
• LIEF
• Various test file packages (typer, jupyter_core, etc.)

[jameslamb]

Thanks for the nice write-up! Very very helpful. A bit of organization to clarify... rapidsai/ci-conda is not built from this repo, but in https://github.com/rapidsai/ci-imgs, and the two repos no longer have any relationship (#832).

Leave the comment as it is though, it's helpful for this issue as well.

Here's a tracking issue specific to rapidsai/ci-conda: rapidsai/ci-imgs#354

Like I mentioned in rocker-org/ml#38 (comment) I'm unsure when I or anyone else will get to these. You can subscribe to notifications to be notified if they're picked up.

[cboettig]

Sounds good, thanks! Apologies for the repo mismatch, subscribed to the other thread now. For now the work-around in rocker is fine and image sizes are reasonable.