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Podman (the POD MANager) is a tool for managing containers and images, volumes mounted into those containers, and pods made from groups of containers.Podman runs containers on Linux, but can also be used on Mac and Windows systems using a Podman-managed virtual machine.Podman is based on libpod, a library for container lifecycle management that is also contained in this repository. The libpod library provides APIs for managing containers, pods, container images, and volumes.

Podman releases a new major or minor release 4 times a year, during the second week of February, May, August, and November. Patch releases are more frequent and may occur at any time to get bugfixes out to users. All releases are PGP signed. Public keys of members of the team approved to make releases are locatedhere.

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At a high level, the scope of Podman and libpod is the following:

• Support for multiple container image formats, including OCI and Docker images.
• Full management of those images, including pulling from various sources (including trust and verification), creating (built via Containerfile or Dockerfile or committed from a container), and pushing to registries and other storage backends.
• Full management of container lifecycle, including creation (both from an image and from an exploded root filesystem), running, checkpointing and restoring (via CRIU), and removal.
• Full management of container networking, using Netavark.
• Support for pods, groups of containers that share resources and are managed together.
• Support for running containers and pods without root or other elevated privileges.
• Resource isolation of containers and pods.
• Support for a Docker-compatible CLI interface, which can both run containers locally and on remote systems.
• No manager daemon, for improved security and lower resource utilization at idle.
• Support for a REST API providing both a Docker-compatible interface and an improved interface exposing advanced Podman functionality.
• Support for running on Windows and Mac via virtual machines run bypodman machine.

The future of Podman feature development can be found in itsroadmap.

If you think you've identified a security issue in the project, pleaseDO NOT report the issue publicly via the GitHub issue tracker, mailing list, or IRC.Instead, send an email with as many details as possible tosecurity@lists.podman.io. This is a private mailing list for the core maintainers.

For general questions and discussion, please use Podman'schannels.

For discussions around issues/bugs and features, you can use the GitHubissuesandPRstracking system.

There is also amailing list atlists.podman.io.You can subscribe by sending a message topodman-join@lists.podman.io with the subjectsubscribe.

Podman can be easily run as a normal user, without requiring a setuid binary.When run without root, Podman containers use user namespaces to set root in the container to the user running Podman.Rootless Podman runs locked-down containers with no privileges that the user running the container does not have.Some of these restrictions can be lifted (via--privileged, for example), but rootless containers will never have more privileges than the user that launched them.If you run Podman as your user and mount in/etc/passwd from the host, you still won't be able to change it, since your user doesn't have permission to do so.

Almost all normal Podman functionality is available, though there are someshortcomings.Any recent Podman release should be able to run rootless without any additional configuration, though your operating system may require some additional configuration detailed in theinstall guide.

A little configuration by an administrator is required before rootless Podman can be used, the necessary setup is documentedhere.

Podman Desktop provides a local development environment for Podman and Kubernetes on Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.It is a full-featured desktop UI frontend for Podman which uses thepodman machine backend on non-Linux operating systems to run containers.It supports full container lifecycle management (building, pulling, and pushing images, creating and managing containers, creating and managing pods, and working with Kubernetes YAML).The project develops onGitHub and contributions are welcome.

• Specialized signing and pushing of images to various storage backends.SeeSkopeo for those tasks.
• Support for the Kubernetes CRI interface for container management.TheCRI-O daemon specializes in that.

Podman uses OCI projects and best of breed libraries for different aspects:

• Runtime: We use theOCI runtime tools to generate OCI runtime configurations that can be used with any OCI-compliant runtime, likecrun andrunc.
• Images: Image management uses thecontainers/image library.
• Storage: Container and image storage is managed bycontainers/storage.
• Networking: Networking support through use ofNetavark andAardvark. Rootless networking is handled viapasta orslirp4netns.
• Builds: Builds are supported viaBuildah.
• Conmon:Conmon is a tool for monitoring OCI runtimes, used by both Podman and CRI-O.
• Seccomp: A unifiedSeccomp policy for Podman, Buildah, and CRI-O.

For blogs, release announcements and more, please checkout thepodman.io website!

Installation notesInformation on how to install Podman in your environment.

OCI Hooks SupportInformation on how Podman configuresOCI Hooks to run when launching a container.

Podman APIDocumentation on the Podman REST API.

Podman CommandsA list of the Podman commands with links to their man pages and in many cases videosshowing the commands in use.

Podman Container ImagesInformation on the Podman Container Images found onquay.io.

Podman Troubleshooting GuideA list of common issues and solutions for Podman.

Podman Usage TransferUseful information for ops and dev transfer as it relates to infrastructure that utilizes Podman. This pageincludes tables showing Docker commands and their Podman equivalent commands.

TutorialsTutorials on using Podman.

Remote ClientA brief how-to on using the Podman remote client.

Basic Setup and Use of Podman in a Rootless environmentA tutorial showing the setup and configuration necessary to run Rootless Podman.

Release NotesRelease notes for recent Podman versions.

ContributingInformation about contributing to this project.

Buildah and Podman are two complementary open-source projects that areavailable on most Linux platforms and both projects reside atGitHub.com with Buildahhere and Podmanhere. Both, Buildah and Podman arecommand line tools that work on Open Container Initiative (OCI) images andcontainers. The two projects differentiate in their specialization.

Buildah specializes in building OCI images. Buildah's commands replicate allof the commands that are found in a Dockerfile. This allows building imageswith and without Dockerfiles while not requiring any root privileges.Buildah’s ultimate goal is to provide a lower-level coreutils interface tobuild images. The flexibility of building images without Dockerfiles allowsfor the integration of other scripting languages into the build process.Buildah follows a simple fork-exec model and does not run as a daemonbut it is based on a comprehensive API in golang, which can be vendoredinto other tools.

Podman specializes in all of the commands and functions that help you to maintain and modifyOCI images, such as pulling and tagging. It also allows you to create, run, and maintain those containerscreated from those images. For building container images via Dockerfiles, Podman uses Buildah'sgolang API and can be installed independently from Buildah.

A major difference between Podman and Buildah is their concept of a container. Podmanallows users to create "traditional containers" where the intent of these containers isto be long lived. While Buildah containers are really just created to allow contentto be added back to the container image. An easy way to think of it is thebuildah run command emulates the RUN command in a Dockerfile while thepodman runcommand emulates thedocker run command in functionality. Because of this and their underlyingstorage differences, you can not see Podman containers from within Buildah or vice versa.

In short, Buildah is an efficient way to create OCI images while Podman allowsyou to manage and maintain those images and containers in a production environment usingfamiliar container cli commands. For more details, see theContainer Tools Guide.

$ podman run quay.io/podman/helloTrying to pull quay.io/podman/hello:latest...Getting image source signaturesCopying blob a6b3126f3807 doneCopying config 25c667d086 doneWriting manifest to image destinationStoring signatures!... Hello Podman World ...!         .--"--.       / -     - \      / (O)   (O) \   ~~~| -=(,Y,)=- |    .---. /`  \   |~~ ~/  o  o \~~~~.----. ~~  | =(X)= |~  / (O (O) \   ~~~~~~~  ~| =(Y_)=-  |  ~~~~    ~~~|   U      |~~Project:   https://github.com/containers/podmanWebsite:   https://podman.ioDocuments: https://docs.podman.ioTwitter:   @Podman_io