Podman is a new (first released in 2018) alternative to Docker for executing containers. Developed by RedHat, Podman requires no running background process to support container operations, and since it adheres to the Open Container Initiative (OCI), it can manage all existing Docker-based images. In this article, I describe the steps in the process to setup Podman to run on Windows Linux kernel subsystem.
These steps have been tested on the following minimal laptop configuration:
- Intel Celeron CPU N3550
- 4GB memory
- Windows 10 Home version 20H2
Setup Windows Linux kernel subsystem
There have been numerous guides, including Microsoft’s official guide on how carry out this task. They can be summarized as follows:
- Download and install Windows Terminal from the Microsoft Store.
- Launch Windows Terminal in
Administrator Mode
.
- Launch Run the following commands in the terminal:
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestartdism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:VirtualMachinePlatform /all /norestart
- Restart your computer.
- After restarting, download and install WSL2 Linux kernel update package for x64 machines.
- Open another Windows terminal (not in administrator mode) and run
$ wsl --set-default-version 2
- Open
Microsoft Store
and search forLinux
. - We will use
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
distro.
- Select
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
and clickInstall
.
- After finish, click
Launch
.
- The initial setup will ask you to enter a Linux username and a root password for this distribution.
- Relaunch your Windows terminal, and you will see
Ubuntu 20.04
available as one of the possible shell options in the dropbox box.
- In a normal PowerShell shell of Windows terminal, you can check that your Linux subsystem is installed and running by executing
wsl --list --verbose
Setup Podman
- Launch a
Ubuntu-20.04
shell in Windows Terminal. - Run the following commands (check your typing carefully!). A
$
sign represents the shell prompt of a new command line.
$ cd$ . /etc/os-release$ sudo sh -c "echo 'deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list"$ curl -L https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_${VERSION_ID}/Release.key | sudo apt-key add -$ sudo apt-get update -qq$ sudo apt-get -qq -y install podman$ sudo mkdir -p /etc/containers$ echo -e "[registries.search]\nregistries = ['docker.io','quay.io']" | sudo tee /etc/containers/registries.conf$ sudo cp /usr/share/containers/containers.conf /etc/containers/
- Open the file
/ect/containers/containers.conf
using your favorite editor . You will need to run the command withsudo
. - Find the options for
cgroup_manager
andevents_logger
(they will be commented out), uncomment, and change them to the followings:
cgroup_manager = "cgroupfs"
events_logger = "file"
- Now you can test the operation of
podman
by first run:
$ podman info
- The resulting output should give detailed information about your machine and the Linux subsystem being used to run podman.
- First, we will use
podman
to run theHello World
container fromdocker.io
.
$ podman run hello-world
$ podman image ls
- You should be able to observe how the
hello-world
image is pulled fromdocker.io
and run, and how the image remains in your computer image repository afterward.
- Next, we will attempt to launch an
nginx
webserver inside podman and see how we can view the server from the Windows host machine browser.
$ podman run -it -p 8080:80 nginx
- We need to identify the IP address assigned to the Linux subsystem by Windows.
- Open an
Ubuntu-20.04
shell in the Windows Terminal and run the following
$ ip addr | grep 172
The first 172.xxx.xxx.xxx
address is the IP address assigned to the Linux kernel subsystem by the Windows host.
- Open a browser on your Windows host machine, copy the
172...
address found in the previous command, and add:8080
as the port:
- This demonstrates that your
podman
installation is now working properly inside Windows.