Podman 4.3.0 is now available! There’s a lot to be excited about, including numerous new features, over 30 bug fixes, and many other improvements. A major focus of 4.3 has been on improving Docker compatibility, including the addition of many missing options and aliases to Podman’s command line to further our efforts to make transitioning to Podman a seamless change. Podman’s integration with Kubernetes has also seen many improvements, including improved integration with systemd and support for automatic updates. Read on for more details and these changes and more!

The Podman team made improved compatibility with Docker a priority for Podman 4.3. We audited Podman’s commands against the Docker command line tool to identify missing and unsupported options and then set to work adding and fixing differences. As part of these, we added a dozen new options to various Podman commands, with many of these being missing aliases for existing options. A new set of commands, podman context, have been added for compatibility with docker context. These are also aliases (for podman system connection commands), and will usually be hidden as they are only required for scripts originally written to use Docker. We have also removed a known incompatibility with Docker in Podman’s volume handling. Docker compatibility remains a focus for Podman, and we will continue our efforts to make migrating to Podman effortless.

Podman’s Kubernetes integration also saw numerous changes, the biggest of which is the creation of the podman kube command. Previously, Kubernetes YAML was generated with podman generate kube and ran with podman play kube, but users found this confusing - it wasn’t immediately obvious from podman help that the commands existed. By moving the commands to podman kube generate and podman kube play and introducing a new command to tear down pods (podman kube down), we consolidated all Kubernetes commands in one easy-to-find place. The podman generate kube, and podman play kube commands will continue to work, but the new podman kube commands will be preferred.

Of course, we didn’t stop at just renaming commands. We’ve made a number of further additions to podman kube play, most notably improved systemd integration. In Podman 4.2, we added podman-kube@.service to allow pods created with podman kube play to be managed with systemd. With Podman 4.3, we’ve improved this in two significant ways. First, pods using podman-kube@.service can now use sdnotify to verify to systemd that they have started. This laid the groundwork for the following major change: Pods from podman-kube@.service now support Podman’s auto-updated mechanism, enabled using an annotation (io.containers.auto-update). Furthermore, we made several improvements to podman kube play, including support for emptyDir volumes, support for user namespaces via HostUsers, and support for binary data in ConfigMaps.

These are just a few of the over 30 features and bug fixes included in Podman 4.3.0. Be sure to check out the release notes for more details!

The underlying network components for Podman have been updated. This consists of two projects:

• Netavark - network configuration tool for Podman
• Aardvark-dns - container domain name resolution server for Podman containers

Release v1.2.0 resolves a handful of edge case bugs that were found and reported. In addition, many of the libraries used by the projects were updated.

Podman v4.2.0 has been released!​

Podman 4.2.0, our latest release, is now available. Featuring dozens of new features, including support for the GitLab Runner, significant improvements to podman play kube, and pods in general. We’ve also been working on running Podman on Mac and Windows, with a number of major bug fixes and several new features for podman machine landing. We are also happy to announce an early release of Podman Desktop, a GUI tool for Podman. Read on for more details!

Our new release now supports being used with the GitLab Runner as part of GitLab CI platforms, using the Docker executor. This has been the culmination of months of effort, and required squashing a number of bugs in our REST API. GitLab Runner has been a much-requested feature, and we’re eager to see what users do with it!

As part of the 4.2.0 release, we have made many changes to both Podman pods and the podman play kube command. Pods now have early support for resource limits, allowing CPU and memory use for a pod to be limited. All containers in the pod will share this limit but can still set their own limits. Pods can also be cloned now via the new podman pod clone command. Support for YAML in play kube has also been improved, with additional support for security context settings and the ability to use BlockDevice and CharDevice volumes.

systemd integration with podman play kube has been introduced. Pods launched by podman play kube can be managed by systemd, using the new podman-kube@.service service - e.g. systemctl --user start podman-play-kube@$(systemd-escape my.yaml).service will run the my.yaml file managed by systemd.

Several other features and changes also landed in Podman v4.2.0. Early support for Sigstore signatures is now available in podman push and podman manifest push - expect more in this area in the future as we further integrate Sigstore and Podman. Podman networks can now be isolated (preventing traffic from being sent to other Podman-managed networks) with the --opt isolate= option to podman network create.

These are just a few of the 40 new features and 50 bug fixes included in Podman 4.2.0. Be sure to check out the release notes for more details!

Along with the release of Podman 4.2.0, a new version of Podman Desktop is available. If you are not yet aware of Podman Desktop, it’s a new project under the container organization to help developers work with containers in their local environment with a desktop UI. Podman Desktop is still in its early days. Still, it already provides capabilities to list your images, interact with containers (access logs, get a terminal), connect to registries (pull private images, push your images) and configure podman settings (proxies). An early adopter program has also been set up. Feel free to sign up if you are interested in testing Podman Desktop, providing feedback, and speaking about your ideas, experiences, and pain points! If you are interested in contributing to the tool, your help would also be appreciated. Feel free to investigate the project’s Github.

Podman v4.1 has been released!​

The new Podman v4.1.0 release is now available. This release is all about new features, with some of the most exciting being improved support for running on Mac and Windows, and adding support for Docker Compose v2.0. These are just the beginning, though, as this release also includes the ability to clone containers, significant improvements to checkpointing, and over 25 bug fixes. Read on for more details!

Podman’s support for running on Mac and Windows via podman machine has seen a number of major improvements, chief among them support for mounting the host machine’s home directory into the podman machine VMs by default. Also, on Windows, you can now refer to arbitrary Windows drive paths in your volume mount expressions. This allows containers run by Podman to use mounts from the host, an often-requested feature. Additionally, we’ve added a podman machine inspect command to inspect existing VMs, and support for modifying the CPU, memory, and disk limits of existing VMs using the podman machine set command. Support for non-Linux operating systems continues to be one of our main focuses, and we’re committed to improving our user experience here - stay tuned for more details!

Podman v4.1 is also our first release to support Docker Compose v2.2.0 and up. Since our v3.0 release over a year ago, Podman has supported Compose v1, but the rewritten Compose v2 required further work in Podman to support. Please note that it may be necessary to disable the use of the BuildKit API by setting the environment variable DOCKER_BUILDKIT=0; we’re looking into improving our Buildkit support in the future, so this is not necessary.

There are numerous other changes and improvements to all parts of Podman packed into this release. We’ve added several new commands, including podman volume mount and podman volume unmount (to allow easy copying of files to and from volumes without using them in a container) and podman container clone (creates a copy of an existing container, with the ability to change many settings while doing so). Checkpoint and restore have seen a major improvement with the ability to store checkpoints as OCI images, allowing them to be distributed via container registries. Finally, Podman has gone on a diet - we set out to reduce or eliminate many of our dependencies and managed to reduce our binary size by 8MB shaving off 15% of the original binary size. There are many more changes - too many to list all of them here - so be sure to check out the release notes!

Podman v4.0 has been released!​

Podman v4.0.0, a brand-new major release, is now available. Podman 4.0 is one of our most significant releases ever, featuring over 60 new features. Headlining this release is a complete rewrite of the network stack for improved functionality and performance, but there are numerous other changes, including improvements to Podman’s Mac and Windows support, improvements to pods, over 50 bug fixes, and much, much more!

Podman now features support for a new network stack based on Netavark and Aardvark, in addition to the existing CNI stack. The new stack features improved support for containers in multiple networks, improved IPv6 support, and improved performance. To ensure that we don’t break existing users, the old CNI stack will remain the default on existing installations, while new installs will use Netavark. We’re planning an in-depth dive into the networking changes in a future blog, so look forward to more details there!

Support for Podman on Windows and OS X has also been a top priority, and we have made several major improvements for Podman 4.0. Chief among them is support for mounting the Podman API socket on the host system, allowing tools like Docker Compose to be used on the host system instead of inside the podman machine VM. Also, podman machine can now use WSL2 as a backend on Windows, greatly improving Podman’s support for Windows. More features, including support for volume mounts from the host, are planned for Podman v4.1, so stay tuned for more updates.

Podman Pods have seen numerous new features added to allow sharing resources between containers in the pod. The --volume and --device options to the podman pod create command allows volumes and devices to be mounted to every container in the pod, and the --security-opt and --sysctl options allow these configurations to be set for every container in the pod. Again, these changes are just the beginning of what we have planned - eventually, we aim to have almost every option from podman run available to pods to allow easy sharing of configuration options among containers within them.

These changes are just the tip of the iceberg - there’s far more packed into this release, including major updates to checkpoint and restore, improvements to podman generate systemd and podman play kube, and so much more. Find out more in the release notes.

Podman 3.3 has been released!​

A new Podman release is available, featuring a number of exciting new features, including improved support for running Podman on OS X, support for restarting containers after a system restart, improved support for checkpointing and restoring containers, and 60 bug fixes and stability improvements. Read on for more details!

Podman’s support for running on non-Linux operating systems via the podman machine command continues to improve in v3.3.0. When containers are run inside a virtual machine created by podman machine, port forwarding from the host to the container is now supported - that is, a container that forwards port 8080 on the host to port 80 in the container will now be accessible not just from port 8080 in the Podman-managed virtual machine, but also from port 8080 on the host system. Stability also continues to improve, with many fixes being made to both podman machine itself and the remote Podman client.

Podman now supports restarting containers created with the --restart option after the system is rebooted. Containers created with --restart=always can be automatically started when the system boots if the podman-restart.service systemd unit is enabled. Our main focus continues to be on managing containers directly with systemd via podman generate systemd, which has always allowed containers to be automatically started after boot and provides greater flexibility than the --restart option, but the addition of podman-restart.service will be useful for those seeking improved compatibility with Docker. The podman generate systemd command also saw several improvements, and will not default to using SDNotify instead of PID files, producing smaller and easier-to-understand unit files.

Support for checkpoint and restoring containers has seen several new additions, most notably the ability to checkpoint and restore containers that are part of pods. Additionally, when restoring containers, you can now alter what ports the container publishes via the --publish option. Together, these greatly increase the flexibility of checkpoint and restore.

This release also includes numerous other changes, features, and fixes. Find out more in the release notes.

Podman 3.1 has been released!​

The new Podman release includes a number of exciting new features, including the podman secret command for managing secrets, support for a volume chown option to fix permissions automatically, improved support for volumes in podman generate kube, and over 60 bug fixes, many to the HTTP API. Read on for more details!

Secrets support has been a frequent request for Podman, and 3.1.0 features the first step toward fulfilling it. Secrets add a way to easily add confidential data into containers, by having Podman-managed secret files, which can easily be added to containers. We have added a suite of new commands - podman secret create, podman secret ls, podman secret inspect, and podman secret rm - to manage these secrets, and a --secret flag to podman create and podman run to mount secrets into containers. Please note that the initial implementation of secrets does not encrypt secrets at rest - look for this in an upcoming release.

Podman can now automatically change volume ownership to match the user a container is running as. The new :U mount option for volumes made with the -v flag to podman create and podman run will chown paths mounted into containers to ensure that the user in the container can access the volume. This is very useful with rootless containers, where the rootless user namespace can make it difficult to tell what user on the container will access a directory.

The podman generate kube command can now generate PersistentVolumeClaim volumes for Podman named volumes attached to containers. These have been supported in podman play kube since v2.2.0, but until now, Podman has not been able to create YAML with these volumes. This important addition restores symmetry between generate kube and play kube.

This release also includes numerous other changes, features, and fixes. Find out more in the release notes.

Podman 3.0 has been released!​

This new major release features several exciting new features, including support for Docker Compose, improved security around image pulls by short name, improved networking support, and over 100 bug fixes. Podman v3.0 also features numerous improvements to our REST API and the Podman remote client.

The headlining feature of Podman 3.0 is the addition of support for Docker Compose which can now run against the Podman REST API. There are no changes needed as Compose won’t even realize it’s using Podman. Compose is only supported when running Podman as root; we aim to support it with rootless Podman in a future release.

Podman 3.0 also enables secure short name aliasing by default, a feature that debuted in experimental form in Podman 2.2. With short name aliasing enabled, every time a user-facing Podman process pulls an image by a short name for the first time (e.g. podman pull fedora), it will prompt to ask the user where they want to pull from. This removes several potential ways an attacker could manipulate where an image was pulled from to cause Podman to pull a malicious image.

Podman networking has seen numerous fixes as part of Podman 3.0. We have added a new command, podman network reload, which recreates firewall rules for Podman containers. Previously, reloading the system firewall would render all containers running as root unusable until they were restarted; podman network reload fixes this. Networks created by podman network create also now support labels, and the podman network ls command can filter using these labels.

Podman v3.0 includes the latest version of Buildah along with updates to our other container libraries. Buildah 1.19.2 includes many new features and fixes, including improved support for building multi-platform container images.

Podman v3.0 also includes a fix for CVE-2021-20199. This is a security issue where rootless Podman would rewrite the source address on traffic from published ports to 127.0.0.1, which could cause an authentication bypass on certain images. We strongly suggest upgrading if you use rootless Podman.

As part of 3.0, Podman has dropped support for the legacy Varlink API, which we deprecated in Podman 2.0. We recommend all users of the Varlink API upgrade to the new REST API.

Dozens of other features, changes, and bug fixes are all included to improve stability, performance, and compatibility. These include numerous additional commands and options as well as API changes and fixes. You can read more here.

Podman 2.2 has been released!​

Podman v2.2.0 has been released! Featuring numerous new features and over 80 bugfixes, the new Podman offers a number of often-requested features and improved stability. Read on for more details!

Some of our most exciting new features include support for network aliases and the network connect and network disconnect commands. Network aliases are additional names that containers can be accessed through when using DNS. The network connect and network disconnect commands allow running containers to be added to and removed from networks. These have been frequent requests from users, and significantly improve our compatibility with Docker in networking.

Podman 2.2 also comes with initial support for short name aliasing. This feature, explained more fully here, enhances the security of short names in the podman pull and podman run commands (e.g. podman pull ubi8) by ensuring that that the image we pull is actually the image the user wanted. This feature is purely opt-in for now but will be enabled by default in Podman 3.0.

The podman generate kube and podman play kube commands also saw numerous improvements, most of which were provided by the community. Both generate kube and play kube now support resource limits for containers. We’ve also gained support for Kubernetes’ persistent volume claims and configmaps in podman play kube. We now offer increased control over the containers created by play kube as well, with a --start option (defaulting to true) controlling whether they are started immediately after being created, and the ability to set what log driver they use to improve the ability of podman play kube to integrate with systemd unit files.

We’ve also added several other improvements. The --mount option to podman create and podman run can now mount a container image into a container using the type=image argument. Additionally, the podman inspect command now works with more objects (networks, pods, and volumes) instead of just containers and images. Finally, more Podman commands (podman mount, podman diff, podman container exists) can now work with Buildah and CRI-O containers, in addition to Podman containers.

Numerous bug fixes to APIV2 to better support docker-compose and docker-py.

Podman 2.1 has been released!​

Podman v2.1.0 has just been released! This is one of our largest releases ever, and features numerous new features, over 50 bugs fixed, and extensive work on the REST API. Read on for more details!

Our biggest announcement is that rootless Podman now supports inter-container networking. Previously, it was impossible for rootless Podman containers to communicate directly with each other without using pods. Now, by joining rootless containers to a network, they can communicate with other containers in the same network in the same manner as containers running with full root privileges. This is a major improvement to rootless networking, and addresses one of the largest gaps between running Podman with and without root.

We’ve also enabled a number of new features for images. Podman can now mount images (read-only) so their contents can be viewed without creating a container based on the image, using the podman image mount command. Additionally, podman save and podman load can now work with archives containing multiple images, instead of only one at a time. Finally, Podman’s pull logic has been reworked to retry pulling images when a pull fails due to network issues.

The podman play kube command has also been a focus of attention. It now handles many additional options from Kubernetes YAML. These include support for new volume types (mounting sockets into your pods and setting volumes as read-only), setting restart policy for pods, adding entries to /etc/hosts, and many more. These features are available to anyone using podman generate kube as well.

In addition, there are numerous small improvements. Volume mounts can now use the :O option to be created as overlay mounts - mounts where changes made by the container will not be propagated back to the host. Podman now supports setting the timezone of containers (using the --tz flag). The podman ps command now supports a --storage option which will display all containers on the system, even those not managed by Podman (e.g. Buildah and CRI-O containers).

Podman 1.9 has been released!​

Podman 1.9.0 has been released, featuring initial support for the new containers.conf configuration file, the ability to dynamically allocate user namespaces, and many improvements to the HTTP API.

The containers.conf configuration file (documentation here) is the eventual replacement for our old configuration file, libpod.conf. It contains everything that file had, but also a large number of container-specific configuration settings, including the ability to add volume mounts, environment variables, DNS servers, and much more by default in new containers. As support is still in the early stages, we do not presently provide a default containers.conf, but expect to find one in future releases! The containers.conf file is also shared between Podman and Buildah, and sets defaults for both.

Podman continues to push the boundaries of containers and security. Podman has a new experimental feature to dynamically allocate user namespaces for containers run as root with the --userns=auto flag. This option causes Podman to allocate unique user namespaces for each container it creates, dynamically sized based on the number of UIDs in the image. With this option, it is trivial to run containers in separate user namespaces, greatly improving isolation.

We expect that Podman 1.9.0 will be the last minor release before Podman 2.0. Podman 2.0 will feature a number of major architectural changes to better support the new HTTP API, and will allow Podman to be used locally, as it is today, or remotely, against a Podman HTTP service, with the same executable. More details here.

Podman 1.7 has been released!​

Podman v1.7.0 has been released, including many new features and numerous bugfixes. It features improvements to networking, podman play kube, and systemd unit file integration. We’ve also added the podman system reset command, to remove all existing containers, pods, images, and volumes and reset the system to its initial state. Stability has not been neglected, and this release features almost 60 bugfixes, including major fixes for podman rm, podman exec, and volumes.

This new release features improved support for host networking via the CNI macvlan plugin which allows containers to connect directly to networks the host is connected to. The podman network create command can now create macvlan configs via the --macvlan flag. Containers can also set static MAC addresses. The podman play kube command has also been updated to respect security settings, including user/group, SELinux configuration, and Seccomp profiles. Podman now creates a cgroup namespace by default on systems using cgroups v2, improving container isolation. We’ve made major improvements for running Podman in a systemd service. These changes (and how to use them) are detailed elsewhere in a blog.

As always, please visit our page on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here.

Podman has gone 1.5!​

Podman 1.5.0 has been released! We’ve made major improvements to podman exec, podman generate kube, and rootless containers in this release. Stability has also been a focus, and we’ve fixed over 30 bugs and several performance issues. The new 1.5.0 release is available for Fedora and Ubuntu right now!

With this new release, Podman has picked up a number of improvements to core container functionality. The podman exec command has been completely reworked, including improved handling for attaching to containers. Expect to see more work on exec in future releases. CGroups have also seen major work, with support for CGroup namespaces via the --cgroupns flag to podman create and podman run, and support for CGroups v2 when using the crun OCI runtime - more details here. The podman generate kube command has also been improved and now includes volumes mounted into containers. Finally, we’ve addressed several memory leaks and other performance issues, and Podman should be much more responsive on systems under high load.

Rootless containers have also been improved, featuring improved handling for privileged containers and the ability to use container health checks. Podman now has experimental support for running rootless containers with a single UID and GID using the new ignore_chown_errors storage option. This allows Podman to be run without the newuidmap and newgidmap binaries, and removes the need for any elevated privileges to start rootless containers. This approach is more limited (but more secure) than normal rootless containers.

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here.

Welcome to Podman 1.3.0!​

Podman 1.3.0 has been released! We've focused firmly on stability with 1.3.0, fixing over 25 bugs and making major changes to improve the stability of rootless Podman and Podman volumes. This release also includes a number of new features, including the podman generate systemd command to generate unit files to manage Podman containers, and the --restart flag for podman run and podman create to restart containers on error. We also picked up a fresh version of Buildah, 1.8.2, including numerous fixes and improvements for podman build.

The biggest new features in Podman 1.3.0 are for managing container restart. The --restart flag allows Podman to restart containers when they exit, and the podman generate systemd command makes unit files so you can leverage systemd to manage container lifecycle. These commands seem very similar, but are very different in practice. The --restart flag is much simpler, but more limited - it restarts containers when they exit, but cannot deal with a system restart or dependencies between containers. If you need access to these more advanced features, podman generate systemd will allow you to manage your containers via systemd, leveraging all of its service management capabilities.

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Welcome to Podman 1.2.0!​

Podman 1.2.0 has been released, featuring many exciting new features and fixes for numerous bugs. With 1.2.0, Podman added support for container healthchecks, an events system, and a way to view image layers as a tree. Over 30 bugs were fixed in this new release, including numerous issues with rootless Podman. We also upgraded the version of Buildah driving podman build from v1.7 to v1.7.2, picking up numerous fixes.

Our new Podman release includes support for container healthchecks. Healthchecks provide additional information on container status, running checks defined by the image or user to verify that the application in a container is working properly. Any containers with healthchecks defined will run them automatically, and their status can be checked with podman inspect. The podman healthcheck run command can also be used to manually trigger a healthcheck.

Podman also added a new command, podman events, that can be used to view major lifecycle events for containers, pods, and images as they occur. This command and its corresponding Varlink API can be used by tools which wish to check the overall status of the system, or check when a specific container starts or exits. A few example events are shown below:

2019-04-11 15:49:45.490227772 -0400 EDT container attach 0765d56e25939f66aed5817dd10c5cbc69f177b2b4ef94ec302b8b67475e0a1a (image=quay.io/crio/alpine:latest, name=optimistic_franklin)
2019-04-11 15:49:45.58978211 -0400 EDT container start 0765d56e25939f66aed5817dd10c5cbc69f177b2b4ef94ec302b8b67475e0a1a (image=quay.io/crio/alpine:latest, name=optimistic_franklin)
2019-04-11 15:49:45.590526456 -0400 EDT container died 0765d56e25939f66aed5817dd10c5cbc69f177b2b4ef94ec302b8b67475e0a1a (image=quay.io/crio/alpine:latest, name=optimistic_franklin)
2019-04-11 15:49:46.363842802 -0400 EDT container remove 0765d56e25939f66aed5817dd10c5cbc69f177b2b4ef94ec302b8b67475e0a1a (image=quay.io/crio/alpine:latest, name=optimistic_franklin)

The podman image tree command was also added. This command will print a tree representation of an image's layers. This can be used to easily identify an image's dependencies. An example with a simple multilayer image is shown below:

Image ID: 4a3e4f2db0ac
Tags:    [localhost/buildah-ctr:latest localhost/myimage:latest]
Size:    598.1MB
Image Layers
├──  ID: a13f3c019d29 Size: 274.9MB
├──  ID: 6ae7c90cc44a Size: 323.2MB
└──  ID: 610298fe2990 Size: 1.024kB Top Layer of: [localhost/buildah-ctr:latest localhost/myimage:latest]

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Podman has gone 1.1.2!​

After releasing Podman v1.1.1 a number of bug fixes focusing on command line options and parsing were added. All the details follow!

Changes​

Bugfixes​

• Fixed a bug where the podman image list, podman image rm, and podman container list had broken global storage options
• Fixed a bug where the --label option to podman create and podman run was missing the -l alias
• Fixed a bug where running Podman with the --config flag would not set an appropriate default value for tmp_dir #2408
• Fixed a bug where the podman logs command with the --timestamps flag produced unreadable output #2500
• Fixed a bug where the podman cp command would automatically extract .tar files copied into the container #2509

Misc​

• The podman container stop command is now usable with the Podman remote client

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Podman has gone 1.1.1!​

After releasing Podman v1.1.0 a number of miscellaneous changes and several bug fixes focusing on command line options and parsing were added.
All the details follow!

Changes​

Bugfixes​

• Fixed a bug where podman container restore was erroneously available as podman restore #2191
• Fixed a bug where the volume_path option in libpod.conf was not being respected
• Fixed a bug where Podman failed to build when the varlink tag was not present #2459
• Fixed a bug where the podman image load command was listed twice in help text
• Fixed a bug where the podman image sign command was also listed as podman sign
• Fixed a bug where the podman image list command incorrectly had an image alias
• Fixed a bug where the podman images command incorrectly had ls and list aliases
• Fixed a bug where the podman image rm command was being displayed as podman image rmi
• Fixed a bug where the podman create command would attempt to parse arguments meant for the container
• Fixed a bug where the combination of FIPS mode and user namespaces resulted in permissions errors
• Fixed a bug where the --time alias for --timeout for the podman restart and podman stop commands did not function
• Fixed a bug where the default stop timeout for newly-created containers was being set to 0 seconds (resulting in an immediate SIGKILL on running podman stop)
• Fixed a bug where the output format of podman port was incorrect, printing full container ID instead of truncated ID
• Fixed a bug where the podman container list command did not exist
• Fixed a bug where podman build could not build a container from images tagged locally that did not exist in a registry #2469
• Fixed a bug where some Podman commands that accept no arguments would not error when provided arguments
• Fixed a bug where podman play kube could not handle cases where a pod and a container shared a name

Misc​

• Usage text for many commands was greatly improved
• Major cleanups were made to Podman manpages, ensuring that command lists are accurate
• Greatly improved debugging output when the newuidmap and newgidmap binaries fail when using rootless Podman
• The -s alias for the global --storage-driver option has been removed
• The podman container refresh command has been deprecated, as its intended use case is no longer relevant. The command has been hidden and manpages deleted. It will be removed in a future release
• The podman container runlabel command will now pull images not available locally even without the --pull option. The --pull option has been deprecated
• The podman container checkpoint and podman container restore commands are now only available on OCI runtimes where they are supported (e.g. runc)

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Podman has gone 1.1!​

After releasing Podman v1.0 a number of new features were added and several bug fixes have been added. Some of the new features include the ability to forward ports as rootless Podman, adding short options to some of the existing command options, added --all-tags to the the pull command, further changes for rootless containers and more. All the details follow!

Changes​

Features​

• Added --latest and --all flags to podman mount and podman umount
• Rootless Podman can now forward ports into containers (using the same -p and -P flags as root Podman)
• Rootless Podman will now pull some configuration options (for example, OCI runtime path) from the default root libpod.conf if they are not explicitly set in the user's own libpod.conf #2174
• Added an alias -f for the --format flag of the podman info and podman version commands
• Added an alias -s for the --size flag of the podman inspect command
• Added the podman system info and podman system prune commands
• Added the podman cp command to copy files between containers and the host #613
• Added the --password-stdin flag to podman login
• Added the --all-tags flag to podman pull
• The --rm and --detach flags can now be used together with podman run
• The podman start and podman run commands for containers in pods will now start dependency containers if they are stopped
• Added the podman system renumber command to handle lock changes
• The --net=host and --dns flags for podman run and podman create no longer conflict
• Podman now handles mounting the shared /etc/resolv.conf from network namespaces created by ip netns add when they are passed in via podman run --net=ns:

Bugfixes​

• Fixed a bug with podman inspect where different information would be returned when the container was running versus when it was stopped
• Fixed a bug where errors in Go templates passed to podman inspect were silently ignored instead of reported to the user #2159
• Fixed a bug where rootless Podman with --pid=host containers was incorrectly masking paths in /proc
• Fixed a bug where full errors starting rootless Podman were not reported when a refresh was requested
• Fixed a bug where Podman would override the config file-specified storage driver with the driver the backing database was created with without warning users
• Fixed a bug where podman prune would prune all images not in use by a container, as opposed to only untagged images, by default #2192
• Fixed a bug where podman create --quiet and podman run --quiet were not properly suppressing output
• Fixed a bug where the table keyword in Go template output of podman ps was not working #2221
• Fixed a bug where podman inspect on images pulled by digest would double-print @sha256 in output when printing digests #2086
• Fixed a bug where podman container runlabel will return a non-0 exit code if the label does not exist
• Fixed a bug where container state was always reset to Created after a reboot #1703
• Fixed a bug where /dev/pts was unconditionally overridden in rootless Podman, which was unnecessary except in very specific cases
• Fixed a bug where Podman run as root was ignoring some options in /etc/containers/storage.conf #2217
• Fixed a bug where Podman cleanup processes were not being given the proper OCI runtime path if a custom one was specified
• Fixed a bug where podman images --filter dangling=true would crash if no dangling images were present #2246
• Fixed a bug where podman ps --format {% raw %}"{{.Mounts}}"{% endraw %} would not display a container's mounts #2238
• Fixed a bug where podman pod stats was ignoring Go templates specified by --format #2258
• Fixed a bug where podman generate kube would fail on containers with --user specified #2304
• Fixed a bug where podman images displayed incorrect output for images pulled by digest #2175
• Fixed a bug where podman port and podman ps did not properly display ports if the container joined a network namespace from a pod or another container #846
• Fixed a bug where detaching from a container using the detach keys would cause Podman to hang until the container exited
• Fixed a bug where podman create --rm did not work with podman start --attach
• Fixed a bug where invalid named volumes specified in podman create and podman run could cause segfaults #2301
• Fixed a bug where the runtime field in libpod.conf was being ignored. runtime is legacy and deprecated, but will continue to be respected for the foreseeable future
• Fixed a bug where podman login would sometimes report it logged in successfully when it did not
• Fixed a bug where podman pod create would not error on receiving unused CLI argument
• Fixed a bug where rootless podman run with the --pod argument would fail if the pod was stopped
• Fixed a bug where podman images did not print a trailing newline when not invoked on a TTY #2388
• Fixed a bug where the --runtime option was sometimes not overriding libpod.conf
• Fixed a bug where podman pull and podman runlabel would sometimes exit with 0 when they should have exited with an error #2405
• Fixed a bug where rootless podman export -o would fail #2381
• Fixed a bug where read-only volumes would fail in rootless Podman when the volume originated on a filesystem mounted nosuid, nodev, or noexec #2312
• Fixed a bug where some files used by checkpoint and restore received improper SELinux labels #2334
• Fixed a bug where Podman's volume path was not properly changed when containers/storage changed location #2395

Misc​

• Podman migrated to a new, shared memory locking model in this release. As part of this, if you are running Podman with pods or dependency containers (e.g. --net=container:), you should run the podman system renumber command to migrate your containers to the new model - please reference the podman-system-renumber(1) man page for further details
• Podman migrated to a new command-line parsing library, and the output format of help and usage text has somewhat changed as a result
• Updated Buildah to v1.7, picking up a number of bugfixes
• Updated containers/image library to v1.5, picking up a number of bugfixes and performance improvements to pushing images
• Updated containers/storage library to v1.10, picking up a number of bugfixes
• Work on the remote Podman client for interacting with Podman remotely over Varlink is progressing steadily, and many image and pod commands are supported
• Added path masking to mounts with the :z and :Z options, preventing users from accidentally performing an SELinux relabel of their entire home directory
• The podman container runlabel command will not pull an image if it does not contain the requested label
• Many commands' usage information now includes examples
• podman rm can now delete containers in containers/storage, which can be used to resolve some situations where Podman fails to remove a container
• The podman search command now searches multiple registries in parallel for improved performance
• The podman build command now defaults --pull-always to true
• Containers which share a network namespace (for example, when in a pod) will now share /etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf between all containers in the pod, causing changes in one container to propagate to all containers sharing their networks
• The podman rm and podman rmi commands now return 1 (instead of 127) when all specified container or images are missing

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Podman has gone 1.0!​

Our original goal with Podman was to provide a fully-featured debugging experience for CRI-O, but it has become so much more. Podman 1.0.0 is a fully-featured container engine. It provides a Docker-compatible command line to ease the transition from other container engines. Most Podman commands can be run as a regular user, without requiring additional privileges. Furthermore, all of this is accomplished without a daemon!

Podman made its first public release, v0.2, a little less than a year ago. We've come a long way since then, adding new features like:

• Rootless containers
• Support for pods
• Interacting with Kubernetes pod YAML
• A Varlink API for interacting with Podman on remote machines

We've kept our eyes firmly on stability, fixing over 150 bugs. We’ve also worked on performance, making sure all common operations are optimized. While it is an iterative process, we are pleased with where we stand today. With that, we're excited to announce that Podman is ready for prime time, and it is ready for you.

A key focus of Podman is around security. In addition to support for rootless containers, we’ve added many other security features. Great support for User Namespaces has resulted in better container separation. The podman top command will tell you what security features are enabled for processes within containers. Podman’s daemonless fork/exec model preserves audit information on containers.

This is just the beginning, and we have plans for much more. For example, numerous improvements are planned for rootless Podman, pod support, the Varlink API, and automatic user namespace separation. If you find a feature missing from Podman, feel free to open an enhancement request on our Github. We love your feedback, and many of our best ideas come from users and contributors.

Finally, the Podman team would like to thank all our contributors. Everyone who submitted code, improved documentation, or reported bugs has been a great help.

Changes​

A few of the biggest changes from Podman 1.0.0 include:

• Added the podman play kube command, which creates Podman pods based on Kubernetes pod YAML.
• The podman run and podman create commands now support the --init flag, to run a minimal init process in the container.
• Added the podman image sign command to sign container images.
• Image pulls are now parallelized for increased speed

As always, please visit our release notes on GitHub to see the full changelog.

You can find instructions for installing Podman here

Podman Release 0.12.1.1

We're happy to announce the availability of Podman 0.12.1.1, our latest version. We've been very busy over the last month, and it shows! We've merged over 150 new commits since our 0.11 releases, including major new functionality and several critical bugfixes. Pods, Kubernetes compatibility, and container volumes all saw major improvements.

We hope everyone enjoys the release, and stays with us in the future as Podman gets closer to 1.0. As always, many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

Changes​

This release comes with many exciting new features. To highlight a few of our biggest changes:

• The podman generate kube command was added by Brent Baude, which generates Kubernetes pod and service YAML from Podman containers and pods.
• Initial support for named volumes using the podman volume set of commands was landed by Urvashi Mohnani
• The podman rm and podman rmi commands can now prune unused containers and images with the --prune flag
• Ports can now be published to the host from pods

Numerous bugs were fixed as well, including a breaking change in rootless Podman found in 0.11.x releases.

To see the full changelog, please visit our release notes on GitHub

Some of this work, like the podman volume command, is still very early. We'd greatly appreciate feedback! If you have an enhancement request or a bug report, please file them on our issue page.

Podman release 0.8.3

Our release this week was very smooth. It seems like between CI infrastructure stability, last minute pull requests, and sometimes just plain bad luck, something always gives us trouble on Friday’s. The Fedora packages are created and I see that they are getting their karma and working through the process already.

By the way, we moved! Our new upstream location is https://github.com/containers/podman. It seems to be a more natural fit for our project and more closely associates us with some of our sister projects.

Some of the more obvious changes in this release are:

* Updated documentation to mention that systemd is now the default cgroup manager.
* The create|run switch of — uts-host now works correctly.
* Add pod stats as a sub-command. Similar to podman stats, it allows you to see statistics about running pods and their containers.
* Varlink API endpoints for many of the pod subcommands were added.
* Support format for the varlink API endpoint Commit (OCI or docker)
* Fix handling of the container’s hostname when using — host=net
* When searching multiple registries, do not make an error from one registry be fatal.
* Create and Pull commands were added to the python client.

Our IRC channel has not moved. Much of the development team can be found on Freenode in #podman. Come by and introduce yourself!

Podman release 0.8.1

Our latest podman release turned out to be a lot of internal plumbing. We had more than 50 commits but most were tweaks that most users would not notice. So I don’t have a singular, hot feature to point you at.

That said, if you haven’t tried the python client to for podman, I recommend you do. It allows you to interact with a remote podman instance via SSH.

Other notable benefits of this release are:​

* Fixes to rootless containers including network support using slirp4netns written by Akihiro Suda
* Adjustments to how images are pulled and their metadata
* podman build now supports different isolation mechanims, to better run within a confined container.
* Changes to our integration tests to speed them up
* podman load now supports xz compression
* Tidy up man pages

Podman release 0.7.2

As most weeks are, this was fast and furious. You will see hand fulls of significant features below that have been added to podman this week. All of it is awesome work from the core team and its contributors. There were also two interesting features that users will be interested in: the ability to create a container with multiple networks and the podman remote client.

We have heard from users that they wish to be able to create containers with multiple networks. This can now be done with a combination of CNI configurations and podman. The easiest approach is to take the default podman configuration file /etc/cni/net.d/87-podman-bridge.conflist and duplicate it. Within the file, change the:

* network name
* bridge device (cni0 -> cni1)
* subnet

Then run podman like:

$ podman run -it --network=podman,podman2 fedora:28 /bin/bash

Jhon Honce and I have also been working on a remote client for podman, called pypodman. It is written in Python and allows users to have a podman-like front-end that accesses an actual podman backend on another node. It relies heavily on ssh and we recommend the use of ssh keys to simplify things.

Our vision is this could eventually become useful for those using Macs or Windows as a development environment. Look for more official blogs and write-ups specifically on this.

This is also the release where we start introducing pod concepts. We now have minimal support for pods. Try podman pod — help for further information.

Other significant features include but are not limited to:

* More unit tests for the varlink python client
* Correction behavior for podman stats
* Add — volumes-from to podman run and create
* Fix a small regression in our opt handling
* Add a default AppArmor profile
* Fix path for rootless containers
* Varlink API fixes in how we start start and attach to containers
* Podman ps now reports containers as ‘dead’ instead of ‘unknown’
* Correct behavior in podman rmi on how to handle parent image deletions
* Logged output now goes to syslog as well as STDERR
* When pulling an image by SHA1, we now set the name and tag correctly.
* Better recording of exit codes for container exits

Podman release 0.7.1

Last week was a busy holiday week here in the United States, but we still managed a nice release full of interesting merges.

Many of the significant merges are going to be less than noticeable to users. A lot of updated vendor code was added as well as the removal of unused functions due to cgroups and platform changes.

Speaking of platform changes, one thing I have been working on the last few weeks is to cross-compile for Darwin from Linux. This was really our first need to deal with other platforms and was rather invasive at times. It took several merges over the last few weeks to complete but we have are able to build a Darwin binary. I must emphasize build because the binary is known to not run — as there is a lengthy list of things that would need to be fixed or implemented first. Nevertheless, my goal here was to implement a CI test that would always perform the build so we can protect against subsequent regressions for Darwin should someone decide to work on that platform.

Other significant changes include:​

* several changes to the makefile to make it more efficient
* fix parsing of short options by vendoring in a new urfave/cli
* tutorial fixes
* revert back to a shared cgroup for conmon processes
* remove buildah requirement for the libpod image library
* block use of /proc/acpi from inside containers
* factor pkg/ctime into a separate package

Podman release 0.6.4

This afternoon we were able to overcome some last minute bugs and release a new Podman. The packages are building in Fedora and will work their way through Fedora’s bodhi system. For giggles, I looked at the number of individual contributors this week and was glad to see the number at 10.

Mainly bugfixes this week, one big one was that we do a better job cleaning up containers that run in the back ground.

podman container cleanup was added to cleanup mountpoint, cgroups and network configuration when containers exit. When a container is run in background mode (-d), the podman command exits, but conmon continues to run and monitor the container, when the container exits, conmon executes podman container cleanup to cleanup the container.

There were a number of bug fixes and a lot of vendoring new code — Golang speak for updating the code we depend on from other projects. Interesting things are in store for podman in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned!

I missed writing this blog the last couple of weeks, and wanted to point out a huge new feature from the buildah project. podman build now supports layering. As you may know podman build by default only adds one layer when processing a Dockerfile. This is different the docker build. Docker defaults to layering each line in the Dockerfile, which makes the creation of an application easier, since docker build jumps to the first line changed in the Dockerfile since the previous build. Podman build on the other hand starts at the beginning, which works better in using a Dockerfile in a build system. With the introducion of the — layers flag, you can now get the same behaviour in podman build that you have in docker build, incremental changes to the Dockerfile will start the build at the change point rather then in the beginning. There is even a environment variable BUILDAH_LAYERS which can be set to default to the layers method.

Notable features include:​

* Continued work on podman remote client. A mock up of a podman remote client went into the contrib/ section of our repository. This is not ready for anyone but Jhon Honce as the primary contributor to the python library code.
* Continued work on running podman without requiring you to be root. Giuseppe Scrivano made a bunch of commits related to rootless containers.
* added podman-image and podman-container man page links
* fixed a fatal error where when a container disappeared during podman ps.
* added an authfile option to podman search to deal with private registries.
* fixed a bug related to container startup and attached mode.
* building podman with varlink support is now optionional.

Podman release 0.6.1

It seems that when we have a short work week here in the US, we have rather large releases. To me, that flies in the face of logic. Speaking of which, one particular milestone was reached this week … We had our 1000th commit in Podman!

That is particularly special, because prior to this repository, all libpod work was being done within the CRI-O repository. So the 1000 commits is in actuality since we broke apart from CRI-O. I want to recognize all the contributors who have been helping us along way. Great job! ##Other notable items in the release:

Improvements to podman Remote API​

* Example usage for the Podman python API
* Correct issue with varlink container inspect where not all information was being parsed
* varlink build added to the varlink API
* Python API now can attach to a container

Improvements to podman build​

* OnBuild support for podman build

General Improvements​

* Correctly drop security capabilities when running containers with — user
* Fix edge case of pulling images with shortnames and no registries defined
* Lots of changes with the hooks command
* Make some run options exclusive when using an existing container network namespace
* Podman ps and images now sorts containers and images by their created time.