Podman is a lot like Docker: a tool for running OCI containers. While it maintains backwards compatibility with Dockerfile and docker-compose syntax, it offers a lot of other benefits:
- daemonless: it can run containers without a daemon process running in the background.
- Rootless: can run containers without root privileges
- pods: can group containers into secluded pods, which share resources and network namespace
Podman has other features I haven’t explored yet, like compatibility with Kubernetes yaml file, and being able to run containers as systemd units.
Have you used podman before? What are your thoughts on it?
I personally liked podman’s networking a lot more, but my issue is that it is not well documented. I hope that improves.
May I ask which networking issues you had?
I think one of the issues I had was trying to run pihole with podman on a raspberry pi. I could not get DNS requests to work by just mapping the right ports. I ended up just running with --net=host and it worked, I didn’t feel like debugging further.
I had other issues on my NAS but I don’t remember what it was, I have a lot of services on it, qBittorrent, Wireguard, Jellyfin, Jackett, netdata, prometheus, samba, syncthing, pihole (redundant), wsdd all in docker.
I ran into that same DNS issue with pi-hole but in a docker container, and the (bandaid) solution was to put the container in host network mode too. But turns out it’s not an issue but a feature. By default pi-hole only responds to DNS queries from within its local network. The host machine’s LAN is an external network to the containers, unless you set the container’s network mode to host. Pi-hole does have a setting to make it respond to DNS queries from other networks as well, though. What I’m saying is, that might not have been a podman issue.