Permission Issues

Verify the Global Store Exists

# macOS/Linux
ls -la ~/.rover

# Windows (PowerShell)
Get-Item "$env:APPDATA\Rover" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

If the directory doesn’t exist, run any Rover command to create it automatically.

Check File Permissions

The global store should have restricted permissions. If you encounter permission errors:

# macOS/Linux - fix permissions
chmod 700 ~/.rover
chmod 700 ~/.rover/config
chmod 700 ~/.rover/data
chmod 600 ~/.rover/config/rover.json

File Ownership in Workspaces

When running Rover with Docker rootless mode, file ownership in your workspace may temporarily change during task execution. This is expected behavior. Rover adjusts ownership to allow containers to read and write files properly, and will restore the original ownership at the end of the worfklow execution.

Before running chown commands, check if any tasks are currently running:

rover list

If a task is in progress, changing file ownership may cause it to fail. Wait for the task to complete before modifying ownership. Once tasks finish, Rover restores the original ownership automatically.

If you need to manually restore ownership after all tasks have completed:

# Restore ownership to your user and group
chown -R $(whoami):$(id -gn) ~/.rover/data/projects

Corrupted Configuration

If rover.json becomes corrupted:

Back up the current file:

cp ~/.rover/config/rover.json ~/.rover/config/rover.json.backup

Delete the corrupted file:
Terminal window
```
rm ~/.rover/config/rover.json
```
Run any Rover command to regenerate a default configuration.

Note: Deleting rover.json removes your project registrations. You’ll need to re-register projects, but task data in data/projects/ is preserved.

Reset the Global Store

To completely reset Rover’s global store:

# macOS/Linux
rm -rf ~/.rover

# Windows (PowerShell)
Remove-Item -Recurse "$env:APPDATA\Rover"
Remove-Item -Recurse "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Rover"

Warning: This deletes all configuration, project registrations, tasks, and workspaces. Only do this as a last resort.