Problems with uploads, cant troubleshoot because CONSOLE doesnt work

Support
1

I installed Vikunja via Portainer (docker compose) and it seems to be working very well (after initial teething issues). Now I cannot upload attachments. The webUI does nothing, and the logs are clear, its a permission issue.

(X11; Linux x86_64; rv:146.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/146.0
"time=2026-01-07T02:06:16.413Z level=ERROR msg="open /app/vikunja/files/11: permission denied"

What I don’t understand is that I a starting the container with user/group arguments (environment) which correspond to a local user in the base OS (Rocky Linux). User/group are vikunja:vikunja with UID=1003 and GID=1003.

The docker compose is:

services:
  vikunja:
    image: vikunja/vikunja
    environment:
      VIKUNJA_DATABASE_HOST: *************
      VIKUNJA_DATABASE_PASSWORD: *************
      VIKUNJA_DATABASE_TYPE: mysql
      VIKUNJA_DATABASE_USER: *************
      VIKUNJA_DATABASE_DATABASE: *************
      VIKUNJA_SERVICE_PUBLICURL: http://*************
      VIKUNJA_SERVICE_ENABLETASKATTACHMENTS: 1
      VIKUNJA_SERVICE_ENABLEREGISTRATION: 1
      VIKUNJA_SERVICE_ENABLEEMAILREMINDERS: 1
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_ENABLED: 1
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_FORCESSL: 1
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_HOST: *************
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_PORT: *************
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_USERNAME: *************
      VIKUNJA_MAILER_PASSWORD: *************
      PUID: 1003
      PGID: 1003
    volumes: 
      - /home/vikunja/files:/app/vikunja/files
    restart: unless-stopped
    networks:
      - frontend
    labels:
      - traefik.enable=true
      - traefik.docker.network=frontend
      - traefik.http.routers.vikunja.rule=Host(`*************`)
      - traefik.http.routers.vikunja-http.entrypoints=web

networks:
  frontend:
    external: true

As you can see the local (in host OS) folder /home/vikunja/files is mapped to the internal container path “/app/vikunja/files”.

Issue 1: the subfolder “files” was not automatically created by the container. I had to manually create it (mkdir). Then I ran a chown 1003:1003 on the parent folder (vikunja) to make sure the container user (1003:1003) was the owner of the folder structure. It is confirmed by:

ls -l

drwx------ 3 vikunja vikunja 75 Jan 6 20:46 vikunja

Issue 2: Although the folder “files” exists, and I restarted the container, uploads still dont work and the folder remains empty with the same permission denied error. Everything else in the logs seems to me http 200 messages….

Issue 3: To see under what user the container is running, I tried to go into console from portainer, both the bash and sh are doing nothing. I tried to access from the host OS with “docker exec -it vikunja-vikunja-1 bash” and I get:

OCI runtime exec failed: exec failed: unable to start container process: exec: "bash": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown

Same error with SH…

Issue 4: I cannot export my data, when I press Download I see the following error although I am using my password to login (I quadrupled check…….)

time=2026-01-07T02:12:12.860Z level=ERROR msg="Wrong username or password"
time=2026-01-07T02:12:12.860Z level=INFO msg="POST /api/v1/user/export/download" component=http status=403 remote_ip=192.168.210.20 latency=190.979831ms user_agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:146.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/146.0"

Basically, so far only the webUI and database (MySQL) are working fine…

2

Hey :waving_hand:

The PUID and PGID environment variables have no effect. You need to set the user via the docker compose property: Services | Docker Docs

Did you check the files directory as well? If you don’t chown the parent directory with the -R flag, only the parent directory will have that permission.

3

Hello! Yes, the “vikunja” folder and all subfolders were chown’d with -R

I tried redeploying the container with addition of a label (in portainer) emulating the docker --user argument with “1003:1003” but its not making any difference, I am still seeing permission denied errors..

Is the user hardcoded in the container ?

EDIT: OK I got it working finally! This is where the user UID:GID must be specified if using portainer…

image
image1405×645 54.6 KB

Now regarding the backing-up of my data (exporting), when I click on the download button I see in the container logs:

time=2026-01-08T00:42:02.339Z level=INFO msg=“POST /api/v1/user/export/download” component=http status=404 remote_ip=192.168.210.20 latency=176.460218ms user_agent=“Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:146.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/146.0”

This thread shows the same issue but the OP had permision problems (like I did). However, I no longer see any permission problems and at the current time, I have NO attachments anywhere in the system (the feature just started to work for me).

4

Glad you figured it out!

You’ll probably need to recreate the export since the export file is stored on the file system as well.