Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods that are made from groups of containers. It provides APIs for managing containers, pods, container images, and more.
Podman’s GitHub documentation states that the project is based on libpod, a library for container lifecycle management that is also contained in this repository.
The latest 2.2.1 version that was released earlier this month includes the latest remote client for Windows, MacOS, and the static remote client for Linux.
The tool currently has support for multiple container image formats, including OCI and Docker images and allows for the full management of those images, including pulling from various sources, as well as creating and pushing to registries and other storage backends.
The project also enables the full management of container life cycles, including creation (both from an image and from an exploded root filesystem), running, checkpointing and restoring (via CRIU), and removal.
To improve security and lower resource utilization while it is idle, Podman has no manager daemon.
“Podman can be easily run as a normal user, without requiring a setuid binary,” the developers wrote. “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 the install guide.”
Moving forward, the Podman team is working to improve the REST API as well as rootless containers. Also, the team will integrate libpod into CRI-O to replace its existing container management backend.
