EDIT: For some context, I recently gave podman another go. I have a few services on my homelab server set up in docker containers, so I tried migrating to podman.
After the second major bug (open issue on github) I encountered looked like it would require completely dropping using compose files to work around, I gave up and went back to docker.
I like the idea of podman, but it’s just not stable. I’ll try again in a year or so.
As a bonus, docker’s CLI is significantly nicer.
Docker at home:
chroot
Podman is much better than docker though in pretty much every way
y’all use containers still? I run my site with native installed software configured by hand like a TRUE sysadmin!
You’re that chain smoking black hat with a stack of computers, black out curtains several screens and not a single lightbulb.
Podman is unironically the better choice. Just try to make docker comply with your firewall…
Podman is unironically the better choice.
I like the idea of podman, but it’s just not stable. This meme was inspired by my frustration of trying to switch.
Just try to make docker comply with your firewall.
I literally did this yesterday and it wasn’t that hard. You just add
iptables:Falseto the docker config file.Docker bypasses your firewall and runs as root. Only an idiot would allow that shit… I’m an idiot. But I’m fixing that.
It doesn’t “bypass your firewall”… it lets you shoot yourself in the foot. You’re asking it to open ports without specifying an explicit network interface so it opens them on all interfaces. Which includes opening up the firewall, because what’s the point of putting up a service and blocking it in the firewall.
Also, doing it by hand would be incredibly tedious. Docker automatically adjusts the rules to match the ports and interfaces to its private container netmasks, and brings them up or down as needed when the containers start/stop.
All you have to do is bind ports to localhost or to a private interface if you don’t want the service to be publicly exposed.
Beginners get bitten by this because they say
ports: 9999:9999instead ofports: 127.0.0.1:9999:9999/tcplike they should. Unfortunately most examples out there use the terse version and never explain why it’s bad.
This + forwarding stuff to the docker namespace is working great for me. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nftables#Working_with_Docker
Cult
Ngl after trying out Rootless Podman on my system (I was playing with Distrobox) I kinda wanna switch my whole Homelab to it, I’m just lazy, afraid the move to rootless with blow up everything and have zero fucking free time.
I am running my entire homelab from podman quadlets (systemd managed podman containers) and it’s honestly very dope. Podman gets a bad rap for being second tier to docker but they legit have a bunch of awesome features for Linux users specifically that make it way nicer. Using systemd for docker status can add some misdirection occasionally, but having the logs from containers directly in journalctl alongside the rest of my system logs is amazing
i plan to set up my stuff like that as well, just don’t find time :/
i genuinely run all my shit bare metal
Hopefully none of those things have dependency version conflicts
🤘
This is why I don’t like Docker compared to Podman:
I may be dumb but I apply the firewall at the router level (OPNsense). That should be fine, right?
Security should be layered. Ideally both network & server-based firewalls should be enabled.
I literally yesterday dealt with that. There’s an option to just turn off Docker’s firewall manipulation so you can do it manually.
I had the same issue, but I just added my plain iptables rules to the DOCKER-USER table, which worked fine
Please elaborate…
Basically put:
{ iptables: False, Ip6tables: False }In /etc/docker/daemon.json
Docker became a license nest despite actual devs using k8s like a normal person should.
Meanwhile podman gave us rootless containers, CDI, and quadlets which far outweighs whatever docker is limping to the barn with.
This! Podman rootless quadlets is so powerful and beautifully simple. Just look at that faaar superior security model and hos it doesnt even need a service to manage services because it just integrates natively with systemd I replaced my entire container layer from Rocker Swarm way back with K8s. Then it dawned on me I dont want the pods to move to another node by themselves anyway and then I just moved to Podman quadlets managed Ansible. Oh, and the podman pods are awesome as well.
Is that a dugtrio?
Alternate universe with Digong and Seetrio.
I’m curious why you feel this way? I’m kinda the opposite — podman has features I use that Docker doesn’t.
This meme was inspired by my frustration from trying to switch. I like the idea of podman, but it just doesn’t work. Tbf the bugs I encountered this time were with podman compose rather than podman itself, but still, I’d rather use the tools that work. I’ve had similar experiences when I’ve tried to switch to podman in the past.
Not the poster, but I kinda get this sentiment. For my laptop and things that I do for work, I prefer Podman. Better security posture out of the box, and I’m typically crafting my own pods to work a specific way.
But, if I am just trying to start up some app/service and I’m following the GitHub documentation with the project…I want to just copy and paste and there isn’t a 1-for-1 for
docker compose. Podman does have an alias package so you can saydockeron the cli, but the “compose” part of it is not as good if I just want something to run without dicking with it.So in short, if I’m making something with a container or want to have hands on control, I prefer Podman. If I’m running something “off the shelf”, like just running someone’s docker compose files files from their Github, I’m just running Docker man.
I use the docker compose plugin with podman and it’s the same. My compose stack is massive with tons of services and I migrated it from docker to podman with no issues.
There’s a built in tool to rake docker compose files, and make quqdlets that worked just fine for me?
That’s neat, are you talking about Podlet? Your comment prompted me to search.
Podman is a better choice.
What’s the benefit over Docker?
Rootless, better integrated with system, a bit faster and lighter on resources. Also it supports k8s style yaml configuration both ways and a lot of people are more familiar with them and they also provide some (minimal) interoperability.
a bit faster and lighter on resources.
Can’t confirm. I have two VMs with an identical image (about 200 MB).
Docker: Pulling the image takes about 10 seconds and needs about 200 MB diskspace.
Podman: Pulling the image takes about 15 minutes and needs about 110 GB diskspace.
Docker: Commands like “docker ps”, “docker stop” etc. run in a few seconds.
Podman: Commands like “podman ps”, “podman stop” etc. take at least one minute.
Company confirmed that it is lighter and faster with multiple benchmark at the time of migration. Your case sounds like extreme misconfiguration.
extreme misconfiguration
I did not configure anything, I just installed it from the debian repository.
If this is on Debian 12 I think the issue is that the default storage backend is VFS rather than Overlay, which burnt me as well as it is REALLY inefficient. Look up how to find out what you’re using and change it if that’s it. After doing that it’s been really good for me :)
I am on Debian 13, but the storage might be the issue.
Something is super wrong in your setup or some weird Podman bug on your side. Works flawlessly and quickly on my machine, no such issues.
And on most people’s machines too. So, this must either be an exotic Podman bug, or something not right with your setup. Not many options there, but I hope you’ll find out what’s wrong.
I’m not op. I just like to use the meme when I see the meme.
How exactly is it using four orders of magnitude more space? Did you look what the files?
It is the ~/.local/share/containers folder.
deleted by creator
Not requiring a service running in root context.
Not requiring a service running in root context.
I don’t think I’ve ever understood the distinction in this argument.
Isn’t systemd exactly that, a service running in root context?
I mean yeah you can technically run podman containers by hand as a non-privileged user but nobody does that, let’s be serious. Everybody uses systemd for management and autostart.
I really don’t understand how running a container through docker as a non-privileged user and dropping all caps is any different from doing the same through systemd + podman.
Tons of other services do that, ssh, CUPS etc.
If anybody can explain the difference I’d appreciate it.
While I’ve never used it myself, Docker Rootless mode seems to also allow this?
10 years too late.
It isn’t that easy to setup. Podman just works
At work, avoiding surprise licensing fees. If you ever have over 250 employees or over 10 million revenue, you owe a subscription.
At the home, easy orchestration with systemd
Isn’t that only for docker desktop?
Yes. Rancher desktop exists, btw. Just an fyi.
Edit: An open source alternative to Docker Desktop. It has most of the same features. Occasionally I’ve run into something that doesn’t work, but for the most part it’s just peachy.
It is! If you want to reduce exposure to this you really have to make sure mdm disallows installing it. The numbers trigger regardless of seats, and then you’re on the hook for the licenses for every employee using it.
So even if as a matter of policy you don’t use docker desktop, it’s possible engineers still do.
if you’re asking with regards to systemd orchestration, no. i love deploying containers as Ansible -> systemd -> podman.
No, they mean the license costs. I’m pretty sure, you only have to pay a fee for Docker Desktop…
my bad
I choose Podman bc it’s open source and that’s kind of the reason for using everything as a container bc those are often also open source. Fuck docker
It also can integrate with Systemd via Quadlets. Let’s you control containers as a sytemd service. I personally use them for my home server and have been happy with it.
The learning curve for quadlets is quite harsh in my opinion. I started with podman compose 3 years ago for my homelab, because it allowed user containers.
I tried to migrate to quadlets unsuccessfully, several times over the years. it was only recently that my self-hosted Qwen was capable enough to figure out where I was messing up and automate the process a bit.
I probably wasn’t sufficiently motivated. It felt like podman compose is basically docker compose, but quadlets are a quite a bit different in form and function, so I was never able to grok them:
There is a tool named Podlet that can help translate to quadlets. I was able to fully translate my unraid and compose setups to quadlets.
Are u running podman containers on Unraid or did you migrate away?
I migrated from docker containers on Unraid to using quadlets on RockyLinux. The Podlet utility helped a bit with taking an existing docker container and converting it to a quadlet. Also did thorough testing in a VM before swapping my server.
Interesting, just migrated away from Unraid myself. But chose Proxmox -> Debian -> Podman Containers instead. Any reason in particular you chose Rocky?
The security of Rocky is solid and RL 10 is supported for quite a long time. I’m also used to RHEL based systems at work, as we target Red Hat.
That being said, I wouldn’t recommend it for most people. SELinux can be annoying to deal with and can cause issues where it isn’t obvious that SELinux is the cause.
If I were to chose again, I would probably just pick Debian as most of my workloads are just running in containers or VMs. The only services running on the host are NFS and Samba.
I remember trying it and my compose files blew up to multiple Quadlet files with a much larger total size (lines of code). I find that compose is just more concise and structured compared to Quadlets.
It does have a larger file size compared to compose, sure. The big advantage of quadlets is that systemd will handle things in the event of a failure. It makes it a great option for production environments where you will not need to update your config files as much. It also allows you to have more control over when each application starts, if they rely on a specific disk mount or service running on the system. I’m sure someone else can provide more benefits who use them in a production environment.
Fair enough. My requirements are simply: start all services when the machine has finished booting. And I can’t remember the last time my system failed. Most that happened was a power outage, and Quadlets wouldn’t have helped there either.
So in my case I much prefer simple and easy-to-read configs, over the complexity of integrating with systemd.
Docker compose definitely works for most people, so I would feel pressured to swap.
There is one instance where Quadlets would have fixed an issue we ran into at work. We had a Kafka instance whose container died and went away because we ran out of space on the server. Compose doesn’t recreate containers on failure, so I was called in to fix the issue. Quadlets treats containers as disposable, so it would have recreated it as soon as it went away. The root of the issue was a bad logging config that we fixed on the next business day.
Wtf I thought docker was foss. Fml man
Docker is foss. Docker desktop and docker sbx are not.
It’s FOSS, but not Libre, and more close to open-core than to open source.
It can’t be FOSS but not Libre, the Free in FOSS means Libre. And it also can’t be FOSS but not opensource, of course.
No, Free means “Gratis”, or “Free as in Free Beer”, Libre means “Free as in Freedom”. That’s why FLOSS is recommended to be used instead FOSS, because the latter can be prone to confusion.
The version that is installable from the repositories of Linux distros is all open source. Docker itself, the container engine and runtime are all open source. Nobody cares about stuff like docker desktop or docker sbx, not only are they not critical to the software itself, they aren’t that useful or valuable.
I don’t mean Docker Desktop, I mean docker-cli and moby.
Just because something has a FOSS license and is open-sourced in some code forge doesn’t mean that it effectively respects some (or even all) of the four freedoms.
It’s licensed Apache 2.0, which has been acknowledged as FOSS by the EFF.
Yeah, but I can use the license on my software but not respect that license at all… That’s what I mean. A license itself is nothing if the actions of the developer aren’t corresponding to it.
The version you get from Debian does respect all four freedoms.
Are you sure about that? I see Copyright at the bottom (maybe the name) and is free only for personal tier, everything else costs money. Maybe some of the containers are open source per https://www.docker.com/products/trusted-content/open-source/ but I don’t see where it says anywhere that the actual software that is docker is OSS let alone FOSS.
The core of Docker is called Moby, which is open source on GitHub. So are docker-cli and compose
Ah, explains the whale!
If you install the GUI it literally won’t let you open it unless you agree to their telemetry…
The GUI is not technically “Docker”. It’s made by Docker the company but it doesn’t use the same runtime engine, because it’s meant for non-Linux OS which don’t have it. It uses whatever the host OS has in place as an alternative.
Ah ok, that doesn’t affect me but still, what a bummer
Also it’s more secure and performant as it’s rootless and daemonless.
What exactly is your problem with Docker? It’s open source.
Also closed-source container images exist.
Haha idk, nothing really. Just found a lot of recommendations over Docker for podman.
It also works better sooo
Also, does Docker do rootless containers yet?
It does, but it seems like it’s still a bit of an afterthought. But it’s getting better.
Still tho, podman is fine and I like the project as an alternative to docker.
Docker rootless has been more stable for me than podman
I’ve had the opposite experience. Good to share our data points, though.
Docker is open source though. Docker desktop is not.
Docker desktop is not. (open source)
Which can be a pretty big deal.
This works out to: The product is unencumbered, but the only reliable installer is encumbered as fuck.
That’s a “no thanks”, from me.
I don’t need the sword of “Docker fucking with my colleague’s ability to collaborate” hanging over each of my projects.
I’m not mad at folks using Docker for backwards compatibility. I just don’t need to make the problem worse.
I found Docker pretty easy to install. Though apparently it’s harder on windows, where they suggest you just use docker desktop, in which case, yeah, fair point. But I’d just put docker in WSL if I had the misfortune of having to use it on Windows.
But I’d just put docker in WSL if I had the misfortune of having to use it on Windows.
Oh, thanks! I might try WSL next time, should I be so unfortunate, again.
So, the Docker engine is free, just not the software under certain stipulations. See I don’t like that. A weird caveat for using it.
What do you mean? I don’t see any CLAs or anything like that in the source code.
This
NOTICEin both repos is weird asf:Docker Copyright 2012-2017 Docker, Inc.
This product includes software developed at Docker, Inc. (https://www.docker.com/).
This product contains software (https://github.com/creack/pty) developed by Keith Rarick, licensed under the MIT License.
The following is courtesy of our legal counsel:
Use and transfer of Docker may be subject to certain restrictions by the United States and other governments. It is your responsibility to ensure that your use and/or transfer does not violate applicable laws.
For more information, please see https://www.bis.doc.gov/
See also https://www.apache.org/dev/crypto.html and/or seek legal counsel.
Also, they do limit some kind of uses if you don’t pay.
Use and transfer of Docker may be subject to certain restrictions by the United States and other governments. It is your responsibility to ensure that your use and/or transfer does not violate applicable laws.
That’s true of all software. It may be subject to restrictions by governments. But in this case, it seems to refer to the fact that the US restricted export of cryptographic software, and seemingly continues to restrict. See also Bernstein v. United States.
Also, they do limit some kind of uses if you don’t pay.
You mean Docker Desktop?
Also iirc all software developed in the USA is subject to those restrictions.
…iirc all software developed in the USA is subject to those restrictions.
Oh, well, I didn’t knew about that, yeah.
You mean Docker Desktop?
And, in part yes, but these restrictions also apply to docker-cli and moby, although to a lesser extent
And, in part yes, but these restrictions also apply to docker-cli and moby, although to a lesser extent
What restrictions? The ones on all US software or something else?
Why would you use docker when you could use podman?
I use docker since it’s what I learned on a decade ago, and my nas that I started from supports docker bit not podman in the ‘app store’. I have three other machines running plain Debian, but I would want everything to work together, y’know? I’ve got a set-and-forget setup and I’d rather not break things without substantial benefit…
Plus everybody is like ‘it’s the same thing, no learning curve’ but then I start reading up on it and uhoh, learning curves :p
Plus everybody is like ‘it’s the same thing, no learning curve’ but then I start reading up on it and uhoh, learning curves :p
Exactly this. I tried podman, as a “container” newb, based on the idea that it’s a (better) drop-in replacement for docker, but it didn’t work. My quick attempts to resolve it went nowhere, and there were no instructions for the container I was trying to spin up for podman to explain the differences required.
So, in frustration, I decided to try docker and it just worked.
Good enough for me, for now. I still prefer the idea of not having a daemon running with root privileges, so I’ll likely move over to podman eventually, but I only have so much time to waste tinkering with my setup. And if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
In almost all cases podman will work as a drop-in replacement. Problems usually arise from podman not being rootful by default, which does make a difference in most scenarios that involve volume mounts, exposing ports or other kinds of host resource access. You can run podman as root and nowadays even docker as rootless (though at that point you might be better off with podman).
same, docker just works when I’m trying to use version pinning on half my containers so they don’t try using the wrong rocm version
Use docker rootless.
Just use the repositories in the terminal…
What?
I mean, install it from the repos through your package manager in the terminal, on your NAS.
With every update they warn that any changes made outside the UI may be overwritten (only data in user directories is safe). I have edited a couple config files over the years that have sticked, but they expect the system directories to stay ‘stock’ and warn of data loss or system malfunction if changed. And since it’s my nas it’s a lot of data to be going yolo on, even with backups. Wayyyy to much risk for almost no benefit.
Why would you use podman when you could
#!/bin/ksh daemon_execdir="/home/etebase/src" daemon_logfile="/var/log/etebase" daemon="/home/etebase/pyenv/bin/uvicorn" daemon_flags="etebase_server.asgi:application --host 159.100.247.89 --port 8000" daemon_user="_etebase" . /etc/rc.d/rc.subr rc_bg=YES rc_reload=NO pexp="/home/etebase/pyenv/bin/python3 ${daemon} ${daemon_flags}" rc_start() { rc_exec ". ~/.profile; ${daemon} ${daemon_flags} >> ${daemon_logfile} 2>&1" } rc_cmd $1Oh why you gotta talk so dirty to this little chatbot
Did you mean rc_start $1 as the last line of that script?
Idk, I was lazy and copied from here instead of going to one of my actual OpenBSD installations and checking. Could be different on other BSD style inits.
Some containers don’t like non-root setups.
There are still various incompatibilities between the two, and it becomes relevant if you need to work with any organization that has standardized on Docker-specific tooling.
Atleast Podman is faster + does not require a centralised daemon
At least docker works
It doesn’t and I’m sure there are benefits, but for basic home services daemonless translated directly into more work for no benefit.
Security is always a benefit 😎
Definitely, but then it feels like it comes with a cost rather than benefit of not having a daemon. You gain more control at the cost of convenience.
Keyword there being “feel”. Cos it certainly does add security. Imo quadlets are easier to understand and write than compose files too, but to each thwir own ofc. Most important thing here is to work with what feels the most natural and making the best out of it 👍
I understand that to admins or experienced users service files probably feel like home. To an inexperienced user like me it added quite a lot of friction, especially compared to docker where I pretty much copy the compose file and run it.
I tried to use podman instead of docker, but decided that for my home use it might not be worth the headache, but I might reconsider now that I could use LLM to set those up for me.
Mom, i can i have podman?
Mom: we have podman at home.
Podman at home: rootless docker
