Using Podman#
This guide is written for more experienced Linux users.
In order to run other containers (like servers) on blendOS, you must first understand that you cannot use Docker as it will cause conflicts. blendOS already has a different container runtime on the system, Podman.
Podman is like Docker, but fast, light, rootless, and small. It's 100% compatible with the Docker API and CLI syntax. It really is as simple as this:
Let's say I want to run a docker container for nginx
. Instead of using docker
:
I can use Podman:
podman run --name some-nginx -v /some/content:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro -d -p 8080:80 docker.io/nginx
Docker Hub Prefixes
You will notice I prefix images with docker.io/
under Podman. This is because Podman does not use "default" registries.
All images from Docker Hub must be used as docker.io/image
(for official/sponsored images) or docker.io/author/image
. All other registries work as usual.
You can install podman-docker
to the host or make a shell alias to make this even easier.
For docker-compose
files, just change the image:
section to be prefixed with docker.io
if the image is remote and on Docker Hub. Then, just use podman compose
instead of docker compose
.
Apps that use Docker#
For apps like lazydocker
that don't support Podman directly, you will need to change your $DOCKER_HOST
variable. First, check what it's already set to:
If it points to a file called podman.sock
anywhere, you're fine, just start the user service and socket (shown below).
If not (or if it's empty), change its value to the Podman user socket path, find this with systemctl status --user podman.socket
.
Edit your .bashrc
(or whatever your shell config is) and add the following:
Example:
Instead of docker.service
and docker.socket
, you will have podman.service
and podman.socket
for rooted containers (not recommended unless rootless fails), as well as the user services (systemctl --user
) of podman.service
and podman.socket
(only these two user services must be started).