Railway volumes fail with permission errors for images that run as a non-root user
finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:51:26.988Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:51:26.988Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous
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Docker images whose default user is a non-root UID hit permission errors reading or writing inside a mounted Railway volume, because the mount is owned by root. The symptom is a permission denied on the mount path immediately at startup, on an image that runs correctly with no volume attached.
Railway's documented workaround is to set the RAILWAY_RUN_UID variable to 0 on the service so the container runs as root. If running as root is unacceptable, the alternative is an entrypoint script that starts as root, changes ownership of the mount path, and then drops privileges to the application user.
This catches people on version bumps rather than on new work, because many hardened and official base images switched to a non-root default user in a later tag. The service was fine, one line of the Dockerfile changed to a newer tag, and the volume stopped being writable with nothing in the diff pointing at storage.
Source: https://docs.railway.com/volumes/reference
railwaydockerstorage
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