from Hacker News

How to Replace Docker with Podman on a Mac

by molecule on 9/8/21, 8:18 PM with 85 comments

  • by williamsmj on 9/8/21, 9:20 PM

    My understanding is that this old article is no longer the simplest/easiest way of doing this. For that, see https://marcusnoble.co.uk/2021-09-01-migrating-from-docker-t.... tl;dr:

        $ brew install podman
    $ podman machine init
    $ podman machine start
    $ alias docker=podman
    If you're on an M1 you may run into https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/10577 (which is WIP, and may have been resolved by https://github.com/containers/podman/pull/11451).

  • by suchar on 9/8/21, 9:53 PM

    Is there any practical benefit of Podman over Docker on a Mac? Virtual machine is still needed, so any performance issues are likely to persist (well, maybe Docker for Mac is a bit more buggy, but we can manually setup Docker instead of Podman in a similar way).

    Also, I think we are losing here access to the Docker socket on the host (inside the virtual machine it can be emulated using docker-podman).

  • by deathanatos on 9/8/21, 11:33 PM

    This feels like the whole industry is now all going through the same motions…

    I tried podman; two hurdles I haven't figured out: 1/ sending the context is incredibly slow on podman, compared to Docker+Buildkit. It's definitely trying to send literally the entire context, like Docker without Buildkit does, but even more slowly… 2/ private registry auth. Haven't really tried too hard, but it's not just "a drop in replacement"; I think I need to somehow auth with podman specifically. (Part of this is our external registry is ACR, and we auth with `az`, but I think `az` is presuming Docker…)

  • by lpasselin on 9/8/21, 9:00 PM

    Now there is `podman machine` which makes most of this article outdated.

  • by inyorgroove on 9/8/21, 9:06 PM

    While there do exist several alternatives to Docker Desktop, I am a fan of multipass. Something I don't see anyone talking about, the host to guest volume mounting performance can't be beat. The alternatives can't hold a candle to Docker Desktop's solution.

    I need this volume mounting to get development code changes into the container in a reasonable time and the alternative performance feels like running on a standard hard drive compared to nvme ssd.

  • by tambourine_man on 9/8/21, 10:11 PM

    Is Vagrant still actively used? I was all over it some 4-5 years ago.

    I remember HashiCorp even favoring a newer product they were trying to promote.

  • by throwaway234565 on 9/8/21, 9:35 PM

    How does this compare to multipass? I tried multipass out on an Intel Mac yesterday and it worked great until I connected to corporate vpn (anyconnect) and then it all went downhill. Tried some of the workarounds (https://multipass.run/docs/troubleshooting-networking-on-mac...) but no luck. Back to Docker Desktop.

  • by mbell on 9/8/21, 9:55 PM

    Is there is a solution for using `docker-compose` on mac with podman? I know that podman supports it natively now, and there is `podman-compose`, but I couldn’t find much on getting either working on a mac due to the remote setup.

  • by swlkr on 9/8/21, 10:02 PM

    I tried podman on an intel mac and everything worked except mounting volumes

  • by no_wizard on 9/9/21, 12:52 AM

    Does Podman do a better job avoiding bloat in the development workflow? That’s been a major thing with docker for me, it spins up a new layer whenever I try to do send an arbitrary command to a running vm, which with development (PHP) I find this is something I have to do often, so these layers add up quickly

  • by hendry on 9/9/21, 3:21 AM

    I tried podman on my MBP and didn't get very far :/ https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11479

  • by chrisweekly on 9/9/21, 11:43 AM

    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28379556 for a recent discussion about minikube (the only drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop).

  • by CR007 on 9/8/21, 11:50 PM

    We replaced Docker hub with ghcr + buildah action and we won't ever look back! We are just waiting for more compose support which seems that will happen shortly anyway.

    Thanks redhat!

  • by mikesabbagh on 9/9/21, 12:05 AM

    best thing about podman is the -l option, that refers to last image used

    for example to see the last conatainer's logs:

    podman logs -l

    just beautiful!