I am moving from docker to podman and selinux because I thought that podman is more secure and hence, the future. I thought the transition will be somewhat seamless. I even prepaired containers but once I migrated I still ran into issues.

minor issue: it’s podman-compose instead of podman compose. The hyphen feels like a step back because we moved from docker-compose to docker compose. But thT’s not a real issue.

podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

Spinning up fresh services works most of the time but using old services that worked great with docker are a pain. I am wasting minutes after minutes because I struggle with permissions and other weird issues.

podman can’t use lower number ports such that you have to map the ports outside of the machine and forward them properly.

Documentation and tutorials are “all” for docker. Github issues are “all” for docker. There isn’t a lot of information floating around.

I’m still not done and I really wonder why I should move forward and not go back to docker. Painful experience so far. https://linuxhandbook.com/docker-vs-podman/ and following pages helped me a lot to get rid of my frustration with podman.

  • starryoccultistEnglish
    16•4 months ago

    minor issue: it’s podman-compose instead of podman compose. The hyphen feels like a step back because we moved from docker-compose to docker compose. But thT’s not a real issue.

    podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

    I’m also currently migrating all of my self-hosted services from docker to podman. Look into using Quadlet and systemd rather than podman-compose: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/quadlet-podman

    Your Quadlet .container files will end up looking very similar to your docker compose files. Podman will automatically generate a systemd service unit for you if you drop the .container file in your user systemd unit directory ($HOME/.config/containers/systemd/) and run systemctl --user daemon-reload. Then starting the container on boot is as simple as systemctl --user enable --now containername.service.

    This will not solve your rootful vs. rootless issues, as others have pointed out, but Quadlet/systemd is nice replacement for the service/container management layer instead of docker-compose/podman-compose

    • @tau
      8•4 months ago

      +1 for quadlet. It’s another file format to learn, but it’s worth it, particularly if you want your containers to auto-update. Also check out podlet to help mitigate some of the compose to .container issues.