In this blog post I will share my experience replacing docker with podman on my computer.

A few months ago it was announced that Docker Desktop will require a license depending on how you use it. Based on my usage of Docker desktop it is hard to justify a license for it. I previously heard of podman and thought of giving it a try. But first…. what is Podman? (from the https://www.podman.io website)

 Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman. More details here.

At the beginning I was a bit skeptical of how my workflow will change when replacing docker with podman. Fortunately it didn’t change at all.

After an incredibly simple installation…

# Install podman
$ brew install podman

# To start the Podman-managed VM:
$ podman machine init
$ podman machine start

# Add alias to bash
$ echo "alias docker=podman" >> .bashrc 

I restarted my terminal, built an image, ran it locally, pushed it to my private docker registry, deployed the service to the Kyma runtime environment and everything worked just fine. Zero impact to how I build images and push them.

I encourage you to give it a try… it might work for you as well 🙂