I keep reading about podman, yet it doesm’t FEEL as mature to me as docker for a normal user like me. What’s your opinion? Did you already switch or do you keep waiting for … for what? When will you switch?
I keep reading about podman, yet it doesm’t FEEL as mature to me as docker for a normal user like me. What’s your opinion? Did you already switch or do you keep waiting for … for what? When will you switch?
If you’re only on Linux and don’t ever touch containers on Windows or Mac, podman can work fairly well. You need to be comfortable with orchestration tools like k8s to replace compose (or just do a ton of containers) and you can’t use a lot of COTS that has hardcoded dockerisms (localstack, for example, does not work well with podman).
If you have to use Windows or Mac, podman makes life really difficult because you’re running through a VM and it’s just not worth it yet.
Docker on Windows and Mac also runs containers through a VM though. (It’s more obvious on Windows, where you need WSL (powered by a VM) and Hyper-V (a way to run VMs on Windows). But on a Mac, VMs to run Linux are also used to run Docker containers inside the VM.)
Podman Desktop helps to abstract VMs away on Windows and macOS: https://podman-desktop.io/
For the command line, there’s “podman machine” to abstract away the VM. https://podman.io/docs/installation (installing on macOS is mentioned on that page and Windows has a link to more docs which also uses the podman machine command.)
As for Docker compose, you can use it directly with Podman too: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-docker-compose (there’s also podman-compose as well). The only thing Docker compose doesn’t support with Podman is swarm functionality.
Docker compose can even work with rootless Podman containers on a user account. It requires an environment variable. https://major.io/p/rootless-container-management-with-docker-compose-and-podman/ (it’s basically enabling the socket for podman and using the environment variable to point at the user podman socket)