How to add users to Docker container?

Question

I have a docker container with some processes (uwsgi and celery) running inside. I want to create a celery user and a uwsgi user for these processes as well as a worker grou

Answer 1

The trick is to use useradd instead of its interactive wrapper adduser. I usually create users with:

RUN useradd -ms /bin/bash newuser

which creates a home directory for the user and ensures that bash is the default shell.

You can then add:

USER newuser
WORKDIR /home/newuser

to your dockerfile. Every command afterwards as well as interactive sessions will be executed as user newuser:

docker run -t -i image
newuser@131b7ad86360:~$

You might have to give newuser the permissions to execute the programs you intend to run before invoking the user command.

Using non-privileged users inside containers is a good idea for security reasons. It also has a few drawbacks. Most importantly, people deriving images from your image will have to switch back to root before they can execute commands with superuser privileges.