I'm trying to launch puppeteer inside a podman container but as I read online this isn't really straightforward. I mainly followed this guide but I get the following error which seems pretty contradictory given that I'm launching puppeteer with the no-sandbox arg:

Error generating PDF: Error: Failed to launch the browser process! undefined
[119:119:0122/132051.165237:ERROR:zygote_host_impl_linux(101)] 
Running as root without --no-sandbox is not supported. See .

I set up my dockerfile like this to install google chrome manually inside the container:

FROM node:20 AS build-frontend

WORKDIR /app/client

COPY env.txt /app/client/env.txt
COPY client/ .

RUN grep '^VITE' /app/client/env.txt > /app/client/.env && npm install && npm run build

FROM node:20 as build-backend

# Set up working directory
WORKDIR /app

# Copy environment and server files
COPY env.txt /app/env.txt

WORKDIR /app/server
COPY server/ .
COPY --from=build-frontend /app/client/dist ./public
COPY ssl/server.crt /app/ssl/server.crt
COPY ssl/server.key /app/ssl/server.key

# Install Google Chrome Stable and fonts
# Note: this installs the necessary libs to make the browser work with Puppeteer.
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y curl gnupg --no-install-recommends \
  && curl --location --silent .pub | apt-key add - \
  && sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] / stable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list' \
  && apt-get update \
  && apt-get install -y google-chrome-stable --no-install-recommends \
  && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND="noninteractive" && grep '^REACT_APP' /app/env.txt > /app/.env && apt-get update && \
  apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip python3-venv nginx nginx-common tzdata && npm install && \
  python3 -m venv /venv && /venv/bin/pip install --upgrade pip && /venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt 

# Happens after install of nginx, so that there's no conflict. 
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

# Expose HTTP port for redirection to 443
EXPOSE 80 443

CMD ["node", "server.js"]

I set up the puppeteer launch accordingly to disable sandbox mode and link to the installed chrome:

app.post('/api/generate-pdf', async (req, res) => {

    ...

    try {
        const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
            executablePath: '/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable', // Path to Google Chrome
            defaultViewport: null,
            headless: true,
            args: [
                '--no-sandbox',
                '--disable-setuid-sandbox',
                '--disable-dev-shm-usage', // Reduce the reliance on /dev/shm
                '--disable-gpu',           // Optional: Useful for some environments
                '--disable-software-rasterizer']
        });

In conclusion, this is how I build the container. I add the --platform linux/amd64 parameter as suggested by the guide because the google chrome distribution is compatible with amd64 architecture:

podman build --platform linux/amd64 --squash -t cc-niap .