Podman is a lot like Docker: a tool for running OCI containers. While it maintains backwards compatibility with Dockerfile and docker-compose syntax, it offers a lot of other benefits:

  • daemonless: it can run containers without a daemon process running in the background.
  • Rootless: can run containers without root privileges
  • pods: can group containers into secluded pods, which share resources and network namespace

Podman has other features I haven’t explored yet, like compatibility with Kubernetes yaml file, and being able to run containers as systemd units.

Have you used podman before? What are your thoughts on it?

  • @[email protected]
    1•10 months ago

    We are using the kubernetes executor. You can add additional sidecar services for your jobs, and we’re using that mechanic to run podman as a daemon. There are some gotchas I had to solve if I remember, but now it works nicely for us. Except for Testcontainers, which throws an exception when your Testcontainer is exposing ports

    • agilobEnglish
      1•10 months ago

      I got it all working on self hosted kubernetes and crossplatform builds with buildah. What’s your problem exactly? For TC you need to use some env vars to configure ports in .gitlabci

        • agilobEnglish
          1•10 months ago

          I’ll try to find it tomorrow

          • @[email protected]
            1•10 months ago

            I’m very interested in a solution. Our current setup, where we use an external docker host for Testcontainers and Podman to build images is quite painful

            • agilobEnglish
              1•10 months ago

              I have this on my to-do list, but sorry, can’t promise when I’ll make a working demo. afair the trick was to use something like “podman in-podman”, like dind works in GitLab runners and then some env-vars manipulation so TC thinks it runs in docker, something like

              DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock and I use alpine as gitlab-ci helper image:

                      image = "docker.io/alpine:3.17.2"
        helper_image_flavor = "alpine"

              not sure if that matters, but i had lots of strange problems running with Ubuntu helper images, most were DNS propagation issues

    • @[email protected]English
      1•10 months ago

      Ahh, I had skimmed over and didn’t see you were running it on k8s (so kubernetes executor makes sense. ;) )

      This is good to know though. I actually just stood up a podman runner and it is vastly improved over what I had to do even a year ago if I remember. I’ll need to look into Testcontainers though too as we do use that. Good to know it’s at least progressing pretty well. Thanks!