Live data from Hacker News

Podman v6.0.0

blog.podman.io

131–140 of 269 posts

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#131
I don't understand how podman can be used for serious development work. Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux), and create a bunch of individual files, you can sort of get something a little bit like compose.

But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer can use the same compose file locally that's used for deployment.

How do people actually work with podman? Do you work with a team? How do you setup a local development stack the way you would with compose?

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#132

How is Podman these days? I use OrbStack on macOS and it seems to be much faster, not sure how everything will shake out now that macOS 27 is adding (more) native and performant Linux containers, similar to WSL with micro-VMs.

I'm not sure about macOS, but it is seamless on Linux for my use cases. One thing to note is that Podman Compose defaults to docker-compose as the provider, and I haven't used the podman-compose provider (confusingly named slightly different to Podman Compose, which is the top level abstraction on top of docker-compose or podman-compose). You can still run containers through the Docker engine with Podman, if you need to.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#133

I don't understand how podman can be used for serious development work. Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux), and create a bunch of individual files, you can sort of get something a little bit like compose. But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer ca…

We have a consistent wsl image for everyone. So they are all on Linux. Then we have a podman pod defined in a bash script. We have a Justfile where you can run ‘just services’ and it all “just works (tm)”.

Once the pod is defined you can use ‘podman pod up/down’ to interact with it, but mostly we encourage people to use the Just recipes to do the things.

The thing is, podman has docker-compose like management built in, in the form of pods, but it doesn’t seem to be very well socialized.

On the server we use quartet+systemd and it’s great. Never had an issue with that part.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

author of smol machines here, it has no relation to firecracker. It runs ontop of the libkrun vmm forked with optimizations, which is the underlying lib powering podman as well. open source, will contribute upstream when possible: https://github.com/smol-machines/libkrun

good stuff man i just installed it and its super fast im just not sure is this really secure to run untrusted code i can't find any white papers

the underlying vmm is libkrun: https://github.com/libkrun/libkrun is battle tested and used for podman.

It provides kernel isolation for running untrusted code which is a security boundary that traditional containers can't guarantee.

I'm engaged with a third party security penetration company for their review, and will be happy to share it publicly when it is available.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#135
post #96
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking windows here? On Linux and Mac I believe you can install Podman via a package manager like anything else.

Linux. It’s not the installation of podman that can be fiddly. It’s the setting up systemd unit files and local user accounts for rootless / daemonless deployment of containerized apps that can be a headache. It’s not hard. It’s just fiddly.

Doesn't quadlet fix some or all of those problems? It's supposed to allow you to convert podman containers to systemd unit files automatically

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#136

I don't understand how podman can be used for serious development work. Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux), and create a bunch of individual files, you can sort of get something a little bit like compose. But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer ca…

Podman can run compose - either its own, or docker-compose if you tell Podman to listen on the docker socket.

I use Podman on both macos and Windows, with compose files, so I'm a bit perplexed by this whole comment.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#137
post #6

Anyone have experience switching from Docker to Podman? I have a lot of compose files in my homelab/automation setup and those are what I’m most concerned about.

For me, I'm as grateful for Podman as I am for git.

Podman has been mature and sane. In cases where $someone's container depends on su privs, I blame the $someone, not Podman.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#138
post #105
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the company I work at, it’s primarily inertia. We started using containers with Docker. And then it just continued. We are two out of 20+ developers who would like to use Podman, but the rest is just ”eh, why bother?”. And I don’t fully fault them for holding that position, Docker generally works. Why switch to something which may or may not provide some benefit (most which will be indirect such as better securit…

You can use podman for your local environment because it's pretty much the same

Mostly but there are a few differences and that causes some friction

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#139

One thing I don't like about Podman is that it pretends to be docker-compatible while having some minor differences that will come to bite you. And users of your docker-based project who try to run it on Podman will come to you and complain.

I've found most of the differences to come not from the socket API, or the logical behavior, or CLI differences. But instead from assumptions Docker makes, that it's running rootful, when Podman will not (by default). As such, most of the fixes for Podman/Docker incompatibilities is just addressing that assumption with a few extra flags on the Podman commands to change how the user namespace maps between the containe…

This has been my experience too. And that conclusion, I've found that if I really don't want to deal with such quirks, I can indeed literally just run the same docker compose file in rootful mode, and it works.

Making the changes required to run under rootless is often very simple.

Re: Podman v6.0.0

#140
post #4

No idea why Docker is still so much more popular than Podman. Podman is obviously the better implementation. The new network stuff is a welcome improvement.

I never liked Docker, but someone pointed out to me that Podman is backwards compatible, doesn't need root, and even has simulated docker commands if you need them so you can just alias podman to docker... and voila same experience, so every online tutorial works just fine.
Post reply on HN