Getting Started with Podman
Podman has been on my radar for a while as a docker alternative, I think everyone cringes a bit when they elevate docker to sudo permissions when first installing it. Podman promises a lighter weight and better experience working with containers and seems to be positioning itself as the open source tool of choice for interacting with OCI (open container initiative) style containers.
All that sounds great to on the surface! better user experience, lighter weight controller that wont sap my computer of its battery life and consume any available ram! where do i sign up!
well sadly there is no free lunch and caveat is a big one, podman right now only runs on linux distro's which makes alot of sense when you look at its goals its a container runner and its going to be most at home where containers live.
The reason why docker feels so slow and painful on windows/macos is that its essentially spinning up a linux VM to live on your machine 24/7 which then itself runs the linux containers. So while they do a pretty good job of smoothing out the layers of abstraction you are dealing with at the end of the day with the way containers work there is no getting around this, ignoring inventive workarounds like WSL which has its own caveats but is still something I am genuinely excited to see being worked on.
So back to podman! first thing you might be asking is do I have to rewrite all my dockerfiles for your new fangled format and the answer is mostly no, I say mostly because the glue layers are not 100% flawless but they are getting better everyday!
podman build .
should work just fine for most setups it will check the working directory and see if it can find a a few different file formats but most importantly for docker users it will find and use a dockerfile just fine.
What about docker-compose i hear you say, well you are in luck podman-compose is much closer to a drop in replacement as its job is that of a abstraction layer already.
This above is the library ive been using for my docker-compose needs and its done a good job for local development, if you are relying on docker-compose for any production elements I wouldnt make that jump just yet as they project is still fairly young.
The podman doc's proudly proclaim `alias docker=podman` and your good! This is not an approach I would take just yet but they are getting close and its really exciting to see this project coming along.
