Podman on macOS – sycured: Senior IT / Freelance

It’s time to replace Docker Desktop with Podman on macOS.

Why am I making this change?

I don’t need a GUI for running a simple container and I won’t continue to use something that needs root permission during its install/upgrade process.

Also with a big change: Docker Desktop is no longer free for large companies: A New ‘Business’ subscription is here

In addition, I use podman to run containers on my workstation, servers, and orchestrator (Nomad) so it’s more logical to uniformize the stack.

Install

The easy way is to use Homebrew

brew install podman

Now, we need to set the machine

In my case, I’ve to customize it:

CPU: 2 cores (default: 1)
memory: 4 GB (1024 * 4) (default: 2 GB = 2048)
Disk: 50 GB (default: 10 GB)

podman machine init --cpus 2 --memory 4096 --disk-size 50

Default values are sufficient if you’re not doing hard work.

I haven’t added a custom name so it’ll use the default podman-machine-default

How to start and stop

I use aliases in my ~/.zshrc

alias docker="podman"
alias podmanstart="podman machine start podman-machine-default"
alias podmanstop="podman machine stop podman-machine-default"

Quick fix

Do I need it?

After starting using podmanstart, we’ll try to use port forwarding:

podman pull docker.io/library/nginx
podman run --rm -d --name nginx -p 8888:80 nginx
curl 127.0.0.1:8888

If curl fails with this message

curl: (7) Failed to connect to 127.0.0.1 port 8888 after 6 ms: Connection refused

You need to apply the fix after doing this clean stop

podman stop nginx
podman rmi  nginx
podmanstop

Fix

The fix for port forwarding is adding this lien in ~/.config/containers/containers.conf

rootless_networking = "cni"

All done, you can work correctly and you can replace docker-compose with podman-compose