Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running Open Container Initiative (OCI) containers and container images on your Linux System. It is an open-source project that is available on most Linux platforms and resides on GitHub. Containers under the control of Podman can either be run by root or by a non-privileged user. Podman provides a docker engine compatible command interface and most of the commands can simply be used by alias docker=podman for experience professionals on docker. However, that said, Podman is not a replacement of dockerd, docker compose and docker swarm yet. In this post, we’ll learn the basic operations with Podman as container engine.

Installing Podman

For installing or building Podman, please see the official instructions at installation instructions. Do note that like other container engines such as docker, Podman binaries are combination of many other packages such as runc, criu, etc. Here’s some of them from list (this might vary depending upon your distro and already available packages):

Packages Altered:
    Install protobuf-c-1.3.0-4.el8.x86_64                                           @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install libnet-1.1.6-15.el8.x86_64                                              @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install container-selinux-2:2.155.0-1.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.noarch       @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install criu-3.15-1.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64                         @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install libslirp-4.3.1-1.module+el8.3.1+9803+64eb0fd6.x86_64                    @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install podman-2.2.1-7.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64                      @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install slirp4netns-1.1.8-1.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64                 @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install containernetworking-plugins-0.9.0-1.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64 @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install podman-catatonit-2.2.1-7.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64            @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install containers-common-1:1.2.0-9.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64         @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install runc-1.0.0-70.rc92.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64                  @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install conmon-2:2.0.22-3.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64                   @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install fuse-overlayfs-1.3.0-2.module+el8.3.1+9857+68fb1526.x86_64              @rhel-8-appstream-rhui-rpms
    Install fuse3-3.2.1-12.el8.x86_64                                               @rhel-8-baseos-rhui-rpms
    Install fuse3-libs-3.2.1-12.el8.x86_64                                          @rhel-8-baseos-rhui-rpms
    Install libvarlink-18-3.el8.x86_64                                              @rhel-8-baseos-rhui-rpms
    Install nftables-1:0.9.3-16.el8.x86_64                                          @rhel-8-baseos-rhui-rpms

Verify Podman Version Installed

This can simply be verified by running podman --version:

$ podman --version
podman version 2.2.1

Searching for Help in Podman

This can simply be archived by using below commands such as: podman --help or man podman or podman <subcommand> --help.

Searching, Pulling and Listing Images

We can search for OCI images using podman search command. We can also apply some filters like --is-official to list only official images, or limit results using --limit, etc:

$ podman search --filter=is-official --limit 3 nginx
INDEX      NAME                     DESCRIPTION               STARS   OFFICIAL  AUTOMATED
docker.io  docker.io/library/nginx  Official build of Nginx.  14523   [OK]

To pull specific image, we need to provide its full image name:

$ podman search --filter=is-official --limit 3 nginx
INDEX      NAME                     DESCRIPTION               STARS   OFFICIAL  AUTOMATED
docker.io  docker.io/library/nginx  Official build of Nginx.  14523   [OK]      
[cloud_user@f05268942b1c ~]$ podman pull docker.io/library/nginx
Trying to pull docker.io/library/nginx:latest...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 19e2441aeeab done  
Copying blob 83500d851118 done  
Copying blob 45b42c59be33 done  
Copying blob f5a38c5f8d4e done  
Copying blob ec3bd7de90d7 done  
Copying blob 8acc495f1d91 done  
Copying config 35c43ace92 done  
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
35c43ace9216212c0f0e546a65eec93fa9fc8e96b25880ee222b7ed2ca1d2151

After pulling some images, we can list all images using podman images:

$ podman images
REPOSITORY               TAG     IMAGE ID      CREATED      SIZE
docker.io/library/nginx  latest  35c43ace9216  2 weeks ago  137 MB

Running, Listing and Inspecting Containers

Similiar to docker, we can run containers using podman run command. Here’s for nginx to run in the detached mode:

$ podman run -d -p 8080:8080/tcp docker.io/library/nginx
53292de2c61e27638946d12ce7a700a85ae37d2126423277310f4e933e3fe205
$ podman ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                    COMMAND               CREATED        STATUS            PORTS                   NAMES
53292de2c61e  docker.io/library/nginx  nginx -g daemon o...  6 seconds ago  Up 5 seconds ago  0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp  naughty_bhabha

Again, running containers can be listed using podman ps with optional -a (to indicate to list all previous running/exited containers as well).

To inspect container’s metadata we can use podman inspect command along with the container id in reference:

$ podman inspect naughty_bhabha | grep -i ipaddress
            "IPAddress": "",
$ podman inspect naughty_bhabha | grep -i port
            "Ports": {
                        "HostPort": "8080"
            "PortBindings": {
                        "HostPort": "8080"
            "PublishAllPorts": false,
$ podman inspect naughty_bhabha | grep -i cpu
            "CpuShares": 0,
            "NanoCpus": 0,
            "CpuPeriod": 0,
            "CpuQuota": 0,
            "CpuRealtimePeriod": 0,
            "CpuRealtimeRuntime": 0,
            "CpusetCpus": "",
            "CpusetMems": "",
            "CpuCount": 0,
            "CpuPercent": 0,

To check container logs on stdout, we can use podman logs command along with the container id in reference:

$ podman logs naughty_bhabha
/docker-entrypoint.sh: /docker-entrypoint.d/ is not empty, will attempt to perform configuration
/docker-entrypoint.sh: Looking for shell scripts in /docker-entrypoint.d/
/docker-entrypoint.sh: Launching /docker-entrypoint.d/10-listen-on-ipv6-by-default.sh
10-listen-on-ipv6-by-default.sh: info: Getting the checksum of /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
10-listen-on-ipv6-by-default.sh: info: Enabled listen on IPv6 in /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
/docker-entrypoint.sh: Launching /docker-entrypoint.d/20-envsubst-on-templates.sh
/docker-entrypoint.sh: Launching /docker-entrypoint.d/30-tune-worker-processes.sh
/docker-entrypoint.sh: Configuration complete; ready for start up

We can use podman top command to check process id for processes running inside container:

$ podman top naughty_bhabha
USER    PID   PPID   %CPU    ELAPSED           TTY   TIME   COMMAND
root    1     0      0.000   9m11.999832817s   ?     0s     nginx: master process nginx -g daemon off; 
nginx   30    1      0.000   9m11.000193505s   ?     0s     nginx: worker process

Stopping and Removing Containers

Similar to docker, we can use podman stop and podman rm to stop and remove containers:

$ podman stop naughty_bhabha
53292de2c61e27638946d12ce7a700a85ae37d2126423277310f4e933e3fe205$ 
$ podman ps -a
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                    COMMAND               CREATED         STATUS                    PORTS                   NAMES
53292de2c61e  docker.io/library/nginx  nginx -g daemon o...  11 minutes ago  Exited (0) 8 seconds ago  0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp  naughty_bhabha
$ podman rm naughty_bhabha
53292de2c61e27638946d12ce7a700a85ae37d2126423277310f4e933e3fe205
$ podman ps -a
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE   COMMAND  CREATED  STATUS  PORTS   NAMES
$ 

Removing Images

We can remove images simply using podman rmi command:

$ podman rmi docker.io/library/nginx
Untagged: docker.io/library/nginx:latest
Deleted: 35c43ace9216212c0f0e546a65eec93fa9fc8e96b25880ee222b7ed2ca1d2151
$ podman images
REPOSITORY  TAG     IMAGE ID  CREATED  SIZE
$