Red Hat to contribute container tech (Podman, bootc, ComposeFS...) to CNCF

Does podman support docker compose files well? Devs love them for local environments.

I've been using podman-compose, yes.

I’ve been using it on my Fedora server because I make myself. I think all functionality and syntax is covered. However, the user feedback and TUI of docker-compose is way nicer (interactive at least). Also, podman compose does seem to recreate containers that do not need to be recreated in more cases than I have noticed docker compose do.

I use podman with docker-compose files for my day-to-day work; spinning up databases and other service dependencies for locally running or containerized webapps.

podman-compose never worked very well for me, so I'm running with the podman.socket systemd service and the standalone version of docker-compose. That is however working flawlessly.

What I really like about podman (and which to be fair docker might have since catched up on) is that rootless containers work so well. Gone are the days where bind-mounting a project folder into a container would mess with your file permissions.

In my experience podman also feels easier and less invasive to install, although I can't say if the latter is really the case.

You can run the standalone version for docker-compose against podman. You just need to have the podman.socket systemd service running.

Try podman kube generate and podman kube play. Podman can generate a Kubernetes YAML, and then you can run it with kube play.

I use it together with systemd in my home lab. It's Kubernetes for single node and without the bloat. I love it!

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/kubernetes-workloads-podman-s...

My only problems with Podman is the lack of up to date repos across systems, the fact that the latest raw binaries are managed by a maintainer out of the goodness of their heart, and that the VS Code extension ecosystem for managing pods is not integratable with the existing Docker stuff (and the replacement extensions are woefully underdeveloped).

Otherwise it honestly is great and preferable over Docker.

I won't deny that the outdated repos was a pain in the past, but ever since ubuntu got to version 4 it's been working flawlessly for me.

I think version 4 was where podman became a reliable tool, whereas I found it to be flaky and unreliable in previous versions.

I don't use vs code extensions for managing my containers, so I can't say much about those, but I wonder if many of them won't work fine with an alias for docker and maybe the podman-socket running.

For more information on compose files take a look at the Compose Spec [0], looks like podman compose supports the Compose Spec which Docker compose files use as well.

[0] https://github.com/compose-spec/compose-spec?tab=readme-ov-f...

Yes it doesm even with rootless. We are using it in prod.

Its broken with alias but what's this about the podman-socket? Do you know where I can take a look at that?

I think you can use the VSCode Docker extension if you enable the Podman socket.

Yes indeed. I have that on other systems as well. But I try to keep both around to notice these kind of differences. (I’m working on tooling that relies on docker compose files so I like to see how it behaves in different setups.)

Being able to play around with kube files and then just shove them into a my-seevice.kube and execute them via systemd is really neat. The documentation is pretty OK as well: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...

The only downside is that some things are not yet supported in quadlets, and that things don't map 1 to 1 between quadlets and the command line.