Podman, rootless containers work well, and there is no central process running everything. I like that starting containers on boot is integrated with systemd.
How do you automatically start podman containers? I currently just manually add systemd entries but that’s a lot more cumbersome than Docker which doesn’t require you to do anything at all.
I use Quadlet, which is now merged in podman. The only issue I had with it is running system systemd services as other (rootless) users, I can’t get it to create cid files that the users can access. In those cases only, I have to modify the generated services files, which defeats the purpose.
Since I use Docker Compose with Podman, I just make a single systemd service to run Docker Compose on boot, thereby starting all my containers at once.
That’s an interesting way to do it. Do you have everything in 1 compose file?
I have one Compose file per stack, which is an application and all of its containers, databases, etc. Pretty much the same way I organized things with just Docker.
i would like to try… but as far as i know, there is no “docker compose up -d”
Podman supports docker compose just fine. You have to run it as a service, so that it can expose a socket like docker does, but it supports doing exactly that
Apparently it does! podman-compose
cool, thank you!
Check my comment history for an example of a simple bind mount
compose.yamlI use for developing a small Python project. It’s exactly the same as Docker Compose (since Podman Compose follows the Compose spec) but if you’re just getting started, it might be a good skeleton to build on.i have all my stacks on docker compose. if it follows the same specks, i would only need to convert volumes and networks
Don’t overthink this. Just start using something.
definitely docker. it just has so much more documentation and community involvement.
On what host system?
If you’re running it for your own network, just use Docker. The tooling is way, way better for docker, especially for a beginner.
I do a lot of docker/k8s at work, and I use podman at home. Podman is very cool in theory but still rough around the edges. I recommend docker if you just want to get started, Podman is a little extra work.
I started with Docker and then migrated to Podman for the integrated Cockpit dashboard support. All my docker-compose files work transparently on top of rootful Podman so the migration was relatively easy. Things get finicky when you try to go rootless though.
I say try both. Rootful podman is gonna be closest to the Docker experience.
Whichever one is better supported by the containers you want to run.
They both support the same containers
Podman, dockerd is a single point of failure
Docker because it just works. Podman has another 5 years (hopefully) to get this part right IMO.
A year or two ago (whenever docker changed the business license of docker for Mac) I changed to podman and aliased docker=podman. It behaves the same, you would just about never know rootful podman vs docker.
Rootless podman is super cool and a much better security ideal - but comparing more apples to apples would be podman running as root vs docker.
I use podman, even when I started out. But I am a tinkerer. I think for the average beginner, docker will be easier as so much out there assumes you are using Docker only, and hard codes it. Unless you wanna deal with that, use Docker.
