Install Podman on CentOS 7 / Fedora 36/35/34/33/32

This guide will discuss how to install Podman on CentOS 7 / Fedora 36/35/34/33/32. Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. The major difference between Docker and Podman is that there is no daemon in Podman.

For Ubuntu, check: How to install podman on Ubuntu

Podman uses container runtimes as well for example runc but the launched containers are direct descendants of the podman process. This kind of architecture has its advantages such as the following:

• Applied Cgroups or security constraints still control the container: Whatever cgroup constraints you apply on the podman command, the containers launched will receive those same constraints directly.
• Advanced features of systemd can be utilized using this model: This can be done by placing podman into a systemd unit file and hence achieving more.

The following set of tools work together to power the use of Containers without an all-time running daemon process.

• Buildah to facilitate the building of OCI images
• Skopeo for sharing/finding container images on Docker registries, the Atomic registry, private registries, local directories, and local OCI-layout directories.
• Podman for running containers without the need for a daemon.

Install Podman on CentOS 7 / Fedora 36/35/34/33/32

The podman package is available on Fedora & CentOS upstream repositories.

CentOS 7:

sudo yum -y install podman

For a newer version check out: Installing Podman 3.x on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

Fedora:

sudo dnf install -y podman

To view installed package details, use rpm command.

$ rpm -qi podman
Name        : podman
Epoch       : 3
Version     : 4.1.1
Release     : 1.fc36
Architecture: x86_64
Install Date: Mon 11 Jul 2022 10:28:58 AM UTC
Group       : Unspecified
Size        : 40586875
License     : ASL 2.0 and BSD and ISC and MIT and MPLv2.0
Signature   : RSA/SHA256, Wed 15 Jun 2022 04:31:43 PM UTC, Key ID 999f7cbf38ab71f4
Source RPM  : podman-4.1.1-1.fc36.src.rpm
Build Date  : Wed 15 Jun 2022 02:31:55 PM UTC
Build Host  : buildvm-x86-05.iad2.fedoraproject.org
...

After the installation, you can display information pertaining to the host, current storage stats, and build of podman.

$ podman info
host:
  arch: amd64
  buildahVersion: 1.26.1
  cgroupControllers:
  - cpuset
  - cpu
  - io
  - memory
  - hugetlb
  - pids
  - misc
  cgroupManager: systemd
  cgroupVersion: v2
  conmon:
    package: conmon-2.1.0-2.fc36.x86_64
    path: /usr/bin/conmon
    version: 'conmon version 2.1.0, commit: '
  cpuUtilization:
    idlePercent: 84.89
    systemPercent: 3.82
    userPercent: 11.3
  cpus: 1
  distribution:
    distribution: fedora
    variant: cloud
    version: "36"
  eventLogger: journald
  hostname: fedora.hirebestengineers.com
  idMappings:
    gidmap: null
    uidmap: null
  kernel: 5.17.5-300.fc36.x86_64
  linkmode: dynamic
  logDriver: journald
  memFree: 1163808768
  memTotal: 2066800640
  networkBackend: netavark
  ociRuntime:
    name: crun
    package: crun-1.4.5-1.fc36.x86_64
    path: /usr/bin/crun
    version: |-
      crun version 1.4.5
      commit: c381048530aa750495cf502ddb7181f2ded5b400
      spec: 1.0.0
      +SYSTEMD +SELINUX +APPARMOR +CAP +SECCOMP +EBPF +CRIU +YAJL
  os: linux
  remoteSocket:
    path: /run/podman/podman.sock
....

Try pull alpine Linux image.

$ podman pull alpine
Trying to pull registry.access.redhat.com/alpine:latest...Failed
Trying to pull docker.io/alpine:latest...Getting image source signatures
Copying blob sha256:e7c96db7181be991f19a9fb6975cdbbd73c65f4a2681348e63a141a2192a5f10
 2.63 MB / 2.63 MB [========================================================] 0s
Copying config sha256:055936d3920576da37aa9bc460d70c5f212028bda1c08c0879aedf03d7a66ea1
 1.48 KB / 1.48 KB [========================================================] 0s
Writing manifest to image destination
Storing signatures
055936d3920576da37aa9bc460d70c5f212028bda1c08c0879aedf03d7a66ea1

Check list of downloaded images.

$ podman images
REPOSITORY                 TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
docker.io/library/alpine   latest   055936d39205   5 weeks ago   5.8 MB

Using Podman on CentOS 7 / Fedora 36/35/34/33/32

Now that you have installed podman on CentOS 7 / Fedora system, the next reading is on how to use it. We have a guide for this:

• How To run Docker Containers using Podman and Libpod
• Setup Docker Container Registry with Podman & Let’s Encrypt SSL
• Publish Container Images to Docker Hub / Image registry with Podman

Conclusion

Podman shows a lot of promise in the future of Containerization. In fact, Red Hat did not just remove the Docker container engine from OpenShift. It also removed the Docker container engine, along with the docker command, from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 entirely. Thank you for reading through.