It's Making Me REPLACE Docker...

Podman is Docker, but secure by default thanks to a fundementally different approach to containerisation and rootless operation. In this video I describe the benefits of Podman over a default Docker deployment, as well as some of the core principles that differentiate the two.
I also show how to deploy a VM with a Proxmox template (more to come on that), how to install and configure Podman with Docker Compose files, as well as showing you how to deploy common apps like Portainer, Jellyfin, and Dashy. Could this be a Docker replacement for you?
Docker Compose Files for Podman:
github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
Recommended Hardware: github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
Discord: / discord
Twitter: / jimsgarage_
Reddit: / jims-garage
GitHub: github.com/JamesTurland/JimsG...
00:00 - What is Podman?
01:50 - 3 Benefits of Podman
04:01 - Proxmox VM Template
05:43 - Installing Podman
07:07 - Portainer Deployment
09:04 - Podman Compose & Other Tweaks
12:03 - Jellyfin Deployment
12:35 - Dashy Deployment
13:25 - Outro

[@JustinJ.]

That was awesome, i really enjoyed that and learnt a ton. Keep it up Jim!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, will do!

[@paradiseonheaven]

what ? docker is just a "container" for things like ubuntu, but can run commands inside the dockized version? but as someone mention competition is great. Its also cool we the technology seems more "open". So we might be able to take docker technology but make it more "modern".

[@NetBandit70]

Security is worth the effort. Why we have tolerated Docker's security as an afterthought approach for so long is beyond me. In a follow-up to this video, I'd like to see full hard mode: Podman in a LXC container under Proxmox with hardware passthrough of a discrete GPU to a Jellyfin Podman container. Thanks for giving Podman the exposure it deserves.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, security is often trumped by convenience... Any reason you'd put podman in an LXC over a VM for security? A VM is more secure than a LXC as it doesn't share the host's kernel.

[@l4kr]

lack of features from docker is crazy

[@NetBandit70]

@@l4kr Are there really that many features missing? I'd like to know what so I can know what I'm missing or if I might run into a future constraint.

[@NetBandit70]

@@Jims-Garage Well efficient use of storage and access to underlying host disk resources is the primary reason (in my requested use case). What I'd really like is for Proxmox to have dashboards/integration with Podman at the host level. That way we could cut out the nesting and hardware passthrough stuff. I think its relatively safe to do already but the Proxmox team recommends against it.

[@cheebadigga4092]

Docker isn't insecure if that's what you're saying. Rootless docker works exactly the same as rootless podman. LXC with rootless podman might work better though, since you don't need a daemon.

[@ChatBot-qg2rb]

Awesome! I feel lucky I was recommended your channel. Your videos answered all of the questions I just had.

[@Jims-Garage]

Glad I could help!

[@ozmosyd]

Excellent info. Thanks for sharing chap!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks for the feedback ☺️

[@user-ug1eo4xb7z]

I've tinkered with Podman in the past, but this is the first practical transition video I've seen that helps you over those got-ya moments. Definitely going to spin up a VM to try it out. Just from features point of view, Docker having a rival will keep the Docker developers on their toes.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, agreed. Competition is always healthy.

[@wchorski]

exactly what I was looking for. Definitely would like to see the pain points of transitioning from Docker to Podman.

[@chrisumali9841]

Thanks for the demo and info, Arrgggg now I have to re-think things... have a great day Jim

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, thanks! I wouldn't worry too much if you're already using Docker.

[@chrisumali9841]

@@Jims-Garage Notice a cut on your nose, did docker do that to you, after you setup podman... LOL jk, I hope you get well soon, no one talks about #FightClub

[@Jims-Garage]

@@chrisumali9841 I'm just embarrassed that I was beaten up by a 1 year old...

[@JonBrookes]

very well done Jim. I'm defo going to convert to podman. Back in the day when I started out with docker, security was a thing that was bandied about as to its likely use case however as time went on, exposing local ports, resources and of course running as root became issues and you could as easily in my view, end up with a docker service that is configured to be nearly as vulnerable as using a single virtual to host flaky apps. Glad to have found your channel, the title of this video may have had something to do with its reaching me through the algorithm !

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, and apologies for the clickbait thumbnail. Sometimes you just have to play the algorithm....

[@spicynoodle7419]

I use podman on my personal computer running Fedora Kenote. I mamaged to get some workplace projects that were set up with docker-compose on podman just fine.

[@Jims-Garage]

Nice, that's good to hear.

[@MrVampify]

I wanted to make a comment on the security claim as what was said is actually not true. Yes in general you don't want something to run as root but there is a difference between the daemon that manages the namespaces and the namespaces themselves. A compromised container CANNOT compromise a host without chaining a namespace vulnerability that can break out of a container. There was a vulnerability in --userns-remap in which someone needed to intentionally map the container root to host root to be a breakout vulnerability. Claiming podman is more secure than docker for this reason is like saying debian is more secure when you only login as a non-privileged user. Technically, it is better practice, but is it more secure overall? A good sysadmin should be implementing better security instead of the software itself.

[@snowpoked]

Keep up the good work Jim! ✊

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks 👍

[@lucianbuzatu4602]

Hey Jim, You should try to use Portainer stacks that use the docker-compose plugin, and saves a docker-compose file in Portainer data folder if need it. I believe this way is no need to install the podman-compose. Thanks for the video 🤟.

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks. Yes, that's definitely an option, and likely more user friendly long term. I like to teach what's going on under the hood first so that people understand it.

[@cybr774]

I also recently discovered that you can do gitops with portainer, deploy a docker compose file located in a git repo

[@Jims-Garage]

@@cybr774 nice! I'm currently doing that with fleet in rancher.

[@volkerswille]

Thanks for the introduction! And how do I get my containers to be restarted after a system reboot?

[@Jims-Garage]

I'm going to come back to this in the near future with an updated Podman.

[@olafschermann1592]

Thank you!

[@mikeymop]

❤️ Podman, it came at the perfect time

[@Jims-Garage]

Glad to hear it ☺️

[@ninja2807]

Nice video. Thanks for sharing. I am wondering if portainer already deployed with Docker would be able to talk with a portainer agent deployed with Podman or the other way around scenario.

[@Jims-Garage]

A good question, I don't know. I imagine it might be able to as it's just sending commands over the network and provided it has access to the sock it should work.

[@neilcresswell6539]

Yes, Portainer supports Docker, when podman is exposed using the docker socket emulation..

[@Seba11PL]

So many troubles to do what docker has out of the box 😀This video proved that docker is more mature product 😁

[@dzmelinux7769]

Good video, didn't miss the background distraction sound at all 😳😉 so, what about running GluetunVPN and running other container through the GluetunVPN container?

[@Jims-Garage]

Great suggestion! I'll have to come back to that

[@dzmelinux7769]

@@Jims-Garage If podman can do this, then there wouldn't be a reason not to use it.

[@austin0arbour]

Podman 3.4.4 is ancient and unfortunately Debian based distros don't keep up to date well. I highly suggest deploying a Fedora VM to get the latest version of Podman, 4.7.X I believe, and deploy your container stack using Quadlet. It is simply fantastic!

[@Jims-Garage]

Thanks, that likely addresses the CNI issue, I'll check that out.

[@barfnelson5967]

Can you do a video on gettings nfs volumes to work in this setup? I followed along to test my current setup with docker on podman and everything fails on the nfs volumes I use prodigiously in my docker compose files.

[@Jims-Garage]

Sure, I'm guessing it's a permissions issue.

[@sku2007]

regarding the template, I have a debian 12 cloud-init template. but need to "sudo apt install qemu-guest-agent" to be able to shutdown/restart from within proxmox. does ubuntu have it installed as default? or have you installed it in the template and done the machine-id reset stuff (don't remember exactly) ?

[@Jims-Garage]

I haven't installed it, yet. I'm proposing to come onto that at a later date. I prefer to not template any apps etc. Post deploy via ansible is my preferred method.

[@sku2007]

@@Jims-Garage i see, thanks! my workaround is a note in the template in pve, this gets cloned too. i also install locales and set vim to dark.

[@Berkto00]

for more seamless experience, set up an alias docker=podman lol :D

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha yes! 😂

[@sebasdt2103]

Man I've switched to podman and its security feels in its base state much better.. Are you still running podman in combination with traefik? Im bumping into a issue where podman rootless cant open a port below 1024. So is there a way to do that or "redirect" port 80/443 inside the vm to the container?

[@Jims-Garage]

I'll have to take a look and come back to you. That's a pretty common security feature though.

[@fedefede843]

Nice. Might give podman a second chance. Rootless mode works much better under podman

[@davidbayliss3789]

Glad I fell for the clickbait: subscribed. :) I really struggle with time. I struggle to remember stuff. Most people I work with and deal with seem to view complexity as something that doesn't really exist when it's in your head. If it's expressed in written form, it's complicated. If it's to be remembered in your head, it's simple. I'm at odds with the world lol. I struggle with people. In my day job as a dev I'm tiring my brain with finding solutions with technologies acceptable to the working environment, and dealing with the problem domain of the business. My tooling is centred around Windows, Azure, Visual Studio etc. Little [explicit] containerisation. At home I also like IT and electronics and use a mix of Linux/windows and generally like "systems". I started working in IT in 2016 ish, and became a dev a bit later. Been in my current dev role for about 4 years, and the one before that - dunno ... maybe 1.5 years or something, with a gap between. At home I have little space. Several computers, large datasets and much electronics tooling etc. No money but lots of debt lol. I love data, but can't remember anything. I love stability, but keep experimenting. I want simplicity, but the things I want that better conform to my expectation don't exist or at least aren't commercially available. Building stuff requires free time, headspace, real space etc. that I don't really have and trying to do stuff introduces high levels of instability to my mind and my environment. I live in perpetual conflicting priorities manifest around me and in persistent brain fog from chronic fatigue and overwhelming stimulation. -- Trying to bring apparent order to chaos obviously invites automation and containerisation etc. Current problems I face is that LLMs promise so much! It promises to help me stay organised; especially by leveraging RAG with organised documentation I'm trying to build for my overall "state". And then a voice enabled interface etc. with some agency and memory. While I possess a lot of compute, it's distributed and I only have one up-to-date machine with a reasonably powerful GPU (RTX 4070). I can't afford virtualised GPU (locally). My old Xeon machines, albeit armed with plenty of ECC RAM ideal for ZFS etc. are limited in what they can do with transformer based LLMs / ML when CPU bound. I'm hoping to get some old Quadro cards at some point though to help. I always seem to be in a chicken and egg situation. Especially right now as I'm trying to upgrade a lot of stuff to 10Gb SFP+ based networking and all my datasets to ZFS with either mirroring or n1 or n2 Z-raid sets where possible and even though I'm only really looking at maybe 50TB or so of existing data and a target capacity of around 100TB with two on-prem redundant copies: all this has proved a considerable challenge because of legacy limitations of the equipment I possessed and organic growth unchecked due to lack of time to manage it. I want ZFS (with native encryption that hasn't messed-up for me yet) so that I can stop worrying so much about bit rot of my precious data. My electronics interest align with battery management / power electronics / power distribution and management etc. and it's hard to work on that in my every-day work space especially when it's for the foundational aspects of managing my systems. I have to mount things on the walls lol. I don't leave the Xeon machines on all the time as they consume electricity like there's no tomorrow. My two passively cooled Frost Canyon NUCs - I7's each with 64GB RAM, bolted to the wall lol, are great in so many ways ... in fact I run a VM on one for my work environment and it's fast enough for dev work, and I run pfsense on both with failover and syncing etc. but the machines are limited by 1Gb networking. I have USB to 2.5Gb adapters but throughput can be limited if using USB also for multiple disks attached. They only have one Thunderbolt port. Thunderbolt networking works fine in Proxmox and I've used my RTX 4070 initially in a cheap Thunderbolt eGPU dock thing from Ali Express and that worked well ... but with just one Thunderbolt port I can't daisychain between machines, and I can't afford yet a thunderbolt external device with multiple PCIE slots. My main machine is Proxmox based with Windows as the daily driver VM. I pass the GPU through to that normally. I don't nest WSL with that windows VM. My conceptual approach was for more efficient utilisation of my resources strategically using LXC containers, VMs, and docker etc. Though now I'm presented with architectural compromise e.g. if my GPU is essentially dedicated to my windows VM in practice, then for LLM stuff when I want more oomph I need to have a server running for that on my Windows machine. It's so annoying because Ollama is lovely and runs well in LXC / docker and so on and fits in with my other architecture so well but I'm limited with CPU bound stuff. That's another complexity ... my 13th gen I7 hybrid cores. Proxmox is easier to work through that than VMware but still, it's a lot of faffing about. I try to script everything now - so that I can make that available for RAG also to supplement my fading memory but that requires huge amounts of time. I'm not intuitive in BASH, or Python even. I wish I could do everything in C# lol (half of my day-job). I'm trying to do that with .Net on Linux, but that takes time! With limited time and knowledge, and surrounded by so much chaos and moving goalposts, it's really hard to balance convenience / getting things done / using limited resource efficiently, and security. There's always compromise and uncomfortable sacrifice. Much of the time I feel like I'm drowning in chaos. In my chronic brain fog I often blindly look about, watching KZbin and the like, partly hoping for "simple" solutions that don't require you to be focused on some technology or goal that excludes everything else. I like solutions that I can "containerise" (lol) and adapt to my situation as painlessly as possible. So when I find videos where people present knowledge and approaches and solutions that I can adapt to my needs, I'm very happy. Thank you. I want everything. Simple implementation. Sophisticated deployment/implementation potential. Efficient resource use. Self documenting. Convenient. And secure. I'm hard to please lol.

[@PaulMetalhero]

It works with portainer, great!

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, sure does! Keen to hear your experiences if you use it more extensively.

[@jhonyortiz5]

I am VERY new to docker and have zero experience in networking. I tried setting up jellyfin with hardware transcoding on rootlets docker. Didn't work. Had to use docker with root acces. But like i said, im new to to this. And i dont really know anything about user groups. Just wondering if podman would make this easier.

[@Jims-Garage]

If you're new to this it's probably worth learning docker first as it's more forgiving and basically the same thing. Being root makes things much easier, but be aware that you'll want to come back and fix that at a later date.

[@monish05m]

ya does'nt look like its as seemless as you think. I'll stick to docker for now I really dont want to bang my head against config files just to run a container. But competition is good.

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, not totally seamless but it's a good alternative if you're in the market for changing.

[@monish05m]

@@Jims-Garage id love a replacement to portainer tbh, after the recent free licence crap they pulled changing from 5 nodes to 3. Tried yatch but it's no where close.

[@Jims-Garage]

@@monish05m I'll be doing Kubernetes soon so rancher can be your new home 🏡

[@thestreamreader]

My challenge always is who is really hiring for people who know podman. Docker just has the name at this point.

[@rudypieplenbosch6752]

That is very interesting info, i will think about jumping ship.

[@Jims-Garage]

Definitely worth testing and seeing how it feels

[@rapalstudios63]

how did you solve network naming issue - bridge - wont work nicely with podman and portainer ?

[@Jims-Garage]

Did you create the network manually?

[@rapals9413]

@@Jims-Garagecurrently that’s the only way I see. Is there any trick you have?

[@Jims-Garage]

@@rapals9413 can you pop on Discord and share any logs? Should be easy to fix 🤞

[@thespencerowen]

Podman doesn't work with mount option `Z` on OSX, which makes it impossible to use with ansible-navigator. I've had to go back to docker.

[@Jims-Garage]

Ok, good to know. I'm going to come back to it soon with version 4. Perhaps it's compatible now.

[@ultravioletiris6241]

@@Jims-Garage have you tried podman with ansible lately?

[@olafschermann1592]

Can i run podman on my docker machine side by side?

[@Jims-Garage]

Good question, I don't know. Probably not, and probably shouldn't though. Choose 1

[@PW-72648]

What if I always use docker but as a separate user 'xyz' which doesn't have root privileges? It's simply part of the docker group.

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, you can run docker as non root as per: docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/

[@PW-72648]

​@@Jims-Garage I was actually asking if you don't think it's enough to be secure and not switch to podman at this point :). Additionally we can make sure that container itself is not running using root user inside. As others said I think it's nice to have alternative but it's too early in my opinion to use podman in general. Didn't also had much luck on macOS when I tried to use that long time ago!

[@Jims-Garage]

@@PW-72648 there are a few nuances, containerd is the runtime for Docker which is fine, but "Docker" in the broader sense is usually more than is needed and introduces some of these security issues. Docker to me is great for development, quick and easy, but not for production. Containerd and podman are better for production.

[@tonychia2227]

How to install and setup proxmox virtual environment?

[@Jims-Garage]

Check one of my earlier videos, video 8 I think.

[@KrachaborasJB]

For demo it's nice etc, but try to run container with unprivileged user, app with unpriv user inside container, mounted volumes and to start it on system boot as service and you will see real podman "beauty".

[@elprogramadordelaweb]

If someone in the comments know, you test it this in software development with Macs with the M1/M2 Architecture, because actually i hate a lot the resource use of docker on it. And tbh i dont want switch if the alternative its worst xD

[@bluesquadron593]

Hei Jimbo, got into a bar fight? :)

[@Jims-Garage]

Yes, never fight with a 1 year old!

[@brtkcs]

😅they are dangerous, btw thank's for the video, I'm also thinking about the transition, have you thought about the /lxc fedora server freeipa combination under proxmox?

[@richardbennett4365]

Podperson or podwoman. Or podfemme and podhomme.

[@Jims-Garage]

I'll go with podman(ager)

[@Siqum]

Please make podman videos

[@Jims-Garage]

I'm likely sticking with docker and kubernetes, I don't want to spread too thin. Hopefully with this video you can just apply the compose files to Podman.

[@wsambian]

Podman is slow as compared to Docker. I tried to run express app and it was laggy

[@Jims-Garage]

It all depends, both have their pros and cons and some apps do run better on different platforms. For most situations Docker is perfectly fine.

[@blender_wiki]

in production is a no choice : just use Podman

[@nevinhorton212]

i hate that i fell for the clickbate

[@Jims-Garage]

Haha, sorry!

[@spicynoodle7419]

Why do you still use apt-get in (almost) 2024? Just use apt, less word better

[@Jims-Garage]

You're right, habit is a cruel mistress. I actually use an alias for most of my stuff and just type update.

[@batboy49]

Please...do not say NANO to edit a file...say EDIT a file we all use different editors. For some reason it sets me off a bit, nano just blows as an editor. That did not really mar your beautiful presentation it was a great overview of podman, I am thinking I will be migrating to podman.

[@Jims-Garage]

Sorry, bad habit, a bit like saying "I'm doing the Hoovering". Thanks for the feedback though 😃

[@batboy49]

@@Jims-Garage I know I am from the southern united states where we have coke, orange coke, and clear coke....

[@Jims-Garage]

@@batboy49 😂

[@MysticCaravan]

your audio is very low, needs help