1. Introduction
In this tutorial, we'll look at Podman (short for “Pod Manager”), its features and usage.
2. Podman
Podman is an open-source container management tool for developing, managing and running OCI containers. Let's take a look at some of the advantages of Podman, in comparison with other container management tools:
- Images created by Podman are compatible with other container management tools. The images created by Podman adhere to OCI standard, and hence they can be pushed to other container registries like Docker Hub
- It can be run as a normal user without requiring root privileges. When running as a non-root user, Podman creates a user namespace inside which it acquires the root permission. This allows it to mount file systems and setup required containers
- It provides the ability to manage pods. Unlike the other container runtime tools, Podman lets the user manage pods (a group of one or more containers that operate together). Users can perform operations like create, list, inspect on the pods
However, there are certain limitations to Podman:
- It only runs on Linux based systems. Currently, Podman only runs on Linux-based operating systems and doesn't have a wrapper for Windows and macOS.
- There is no alternative for Docker Compose. Podman doesn't have support for managing multiple containers locally, similar to what Docker Compose does. An implementation of Docker Compose using the Podman backend is being developed as part of the podman-compose project, but this is still work in progress.
3. Comparison to Docker
Now that we have understood what Podman is and what's its advantages and limitations are, let's compare it with Docker, one of the most widely used container management tools.
3.1. Command Line Interface (CLI)
Podman offers the same set of commands exposed by the Docker client. In other words, there is a one-to-one mapping between the commands of these two utilities.
However, the commands like podman ps and podman images will not show the containers or images created using Docker. This is because Podman's local repository is /var/lib/containers as opposed to /var/lib/docker maintained by Docker.
3.2. Container Model
Docker uses a client-server architecture for the containers, whereas Podman uses the traditional fork-exec model common across Linux processes. The containers created using Podman, are the child process of the parent Podman process. This is the reason that when the version command is run for both Docker and Podman, Docker lists the versions of both client and server whereas Podman lists only it's version.
Sample output for docker version:
Client: Version: 17.12.0-ce API version: 1.35 Go version: go1.9.2 Git commit: c97c6d6 Built: Wed Dec 27 20:11:19 2017 OS/Arch: linux/amd64 Server: Engine: Version: 17.12.0-ce API version: 1.35 (minimum version 1.12) Go version: go1.9.2 Git commit: c97c6d6 Built: Wed Dec 27 20:09:53 2017 OS/Arch: linux/amd64 Experimental: false
Sample output for podman version:
Version: 0.3.2-dev Go Version: go1.9.4 Git Commit: "4f4a78abb40fa0e8407e8a55d5a67a2650d8fd96" Built: Mon Mar 5 11:10:35 2018 OS/Arch: linux/amd64
Since Podman itself runs as a process, it doesn't require any daemon processes in the background. Unlike Podman, Docker requires a daemon process, Docker daemon, to coordinate the API requests between the client and server.
3.3. Rootless Mode
As mentioned earlier, Podman doesn't require root access to run its commands. Docker, on the other hand, being dependent on the daemon process, requires root privileges or requires the user to be part of the docker group to be able to run the Docker commands without root privilege.
$ sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
4. Installation and Usage
Let's start by installing Podman. The podman info command displays Podman system information and helps check the installation status.
$ podman info
This command displays the information related to the host such as the Kernel version, swap space used and available and also the information related to Podman such as registries it has access to pull and push images to, storage driver it uses, storage location and others:
host:
MemFree: 546578432
MemTotal: 1040318464
SwapFree: 4216320000
SwapTotal: 4216320000
arch: amd64
cpus: 2
hostname: base-xenial
kernel: 4.4.0-116-generic
os: linux
uptime: 1m 2.64s
insecure registries:
registries: []
registries:
registries:
- docker.io
- registry.fedoraproject.org
- registry.access.redhat.com
store:
ContainerStore:
number: 0
GraphDriverName: overlay
GraphOptions: null
GraphRoot: /var/lib/containers/storage
GraphStatus:
Backing Filesystem: extfs
Native Overlay Diff: "true"
Supports d_type: "true"
ImageStore:
number: 0
RunRoot: /var/run/containers/storage
Let's take a look at some of the basic Podman commands.
4.1. Creating an Image
First, we'll look at creating an image using Podman. Let's start by creating a Dockerfile with the following content:
FROM centos:latest RUN yum -y install httpd CMD ["/usr/sbin/httpd", "-D", "FOREGROUND"] EXPOSE 80
Now let's create the image using the build command:
$ podman build .
Here we are first pulling the base image of CentOS, installing Apache on top of it and then running it as a foreground process with the port 80 exposed. We can access the Apache server by running this image and mapping the exposed port to a host port.
The build command recursively passes all the folders available in the context directory. The current working directory by default becomes the build context when no directory is specified. Hence, it is advisable not to have files and folders that aren't required for the image creation, in the context directory.
4.2. Listing Available Images
The podman images command lists all the images available. It also supports various options to filter the images.
$ podman images
This command lists all the images available in the local repository. It contains the information on which repository the image was pulled from, the tag, its image id, created time and size.
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE docker.io/library/centos latest 0f3e07c0138f 2 months ago 227MB <none> <none 49030e844ce7 27 seconds ago 277MB
4.3. Running Images
The run command creates a container of a given image and then runs it. Let's run the CentOS image we have created earlier
$ podman run -p 80:80 -dit centos
This command first checks if there is a local image available for CentOS. If the image isn't present locally, it tries to pull the image from the registries that were configured. If the image isn't present in the registries, it shows an error about unable to find the image.
The above run command specifies to map the exposed 80 port of the container to the port 80 of the host and the dit flag specifies to run the container in detached and interactive mode. The id of the container created will be the output.
4.4. Deleting Images
The rmi command removes the images present in the local repository. Multiple images can be removed by providing their ids as space-separated in the input. Specifying the -a flag removes all the images
$ podman rmi 785188cd988c
4.5. Listing the Containers
All the available containers including the ones which aren't running can be listed using the ps -a command. Similar to the images command, this can also be used with various options.
$ podman ps -a
The output for the above command lists all the containers with the information such as image it was created from, the command used to launch it, it's status, ports it's running on and the name assigned to it.
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED AT STATUS PORTS NAMES eed30719cd37 centos /bin/bash 2019-12-09 02:57:37 +0000 UTC Up 14 minutes ago 0.0.0.0:80->80/udp, 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp reverent_liskov
4.6. Deleting Containers
The rm command removes the containers. This command does not remove the containers in running or paused state. They need to be first stopped and then removed.
$ podman stop eed30719cd37 $ podman rm eed30719cd37
4.7. Creating Pods
The pod create command creates a pod. The create command supports different options.
$ podman pod create
The pod create command creates a pod with an infra container by default associated with it unless explicitly set with infra flag as false.
$ podman pod create --infra = false
Infra container allows Podman to connect various containers in the pod.
4.8. Listing Pods
The pod list command displays all the available pods
$ podman pod list
The output of this command displays the information such as the pod id, its name, number of associated containers, the id of the infra container if available:
POD ID NAME STATUS CREATED # OF CONTAINERS INFRA ID 7e0a68528aed gallant_raman Running 5 seconds ago 1 c6d06673c667
All the available Podman commands and their usage can be found in the official documentation.
5. Conclusion
In this tutorial, we've looked at the basics of Podman and its features, its comparison to Docker and a few of the commands available.
As usual, the code sample used in this article is available over GitHub.