How To Install Podman on Centos 7

In this guide, we want to teach you How To Install and Use Podman on Centos 7.

Podman is an open-source container management tool for developing, managing, and running OCI containers. 

Advantages of Podman:

• Images created by Podman are compatible with other container management tools
• It can be run as a normal user without requiring root privileges
• It provides the ability to manage pods
• It only runs on Linux-based systems
• There is no alternative for Docker Compose

Steps To Install and Use Podman on Centos 7

To complete this guide, you have to log in to your server as a non-root user with sudo privileges. To do this, you can follow our guide on Initial Server Setup with Centos 7.

Install Podman on Centos 7

First, you need to update your local package index with the following command:

sudo yum update -y

Then, you need to install the Epel repository on your Centos 7 server by using the command below:

sudo yum install epel-release -y

Now you can use the following command to install Podman:

sudo yum install podman -y

Then, verify your installation by checking its version:

podman --version

Output
podman version 1.6.4

To get full information about Podman, you can use:

podman info

Output 
host:
  BuildahVersion: 1.11.7
  CgroupVersion: v1
  Conmon:
    package: conmon-2.0.8-1.el7.x86_64
    path: /usr/bin/conmon
    version: 'conmon version 2.0.8, commit: f85c8b1ce77b73bcd48b2d802396321217008762'
  Distribution:
    distribution: '"centos"'
    version: "7"
  MemFree: 2668564480
  MemTotal: 3973296128
  OCIRuntime:
    name: runc
    package: runc-1.0.0-69.rc10.el7_9.x86_64
    path: /usr/bin/runc
    version: 'runc version spec: 1.0.1-dev'
...

When your installation is completed, you can proceed to the next step to see how to use Podman.

How To Use Podman on Centos 7

Now that you have installed Podman on your server let’s see its basic usage.

Search and pull images with Podman

Just like Docker, you can use the Podman command line to search Images but from different repositories.

For example, if you want to install a Centos container using Podman, then you can search what are the images available through the different repositories.

podman search centos

Then, you can download and pull images with the following command:

podman pull centos

List all Images with Podman

If you have downloaded multiple images and now want to see what are the available images on your system, you can list all of them using the following command:

podman images

In my case:

Output
REPOSITORY                 TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
docker.io/library/centos   latest   5d0da3dc9764   13 months ago   239 MB

Create a Container with Podman

Once you have the image of the application that you want, you can create a container with it. Here we have downloaded the Centos image with Podman. Now we will show how to use it to create a container using Centos Image.

To do this, you can use the following command:

podman run -dit --name orca centos

Note: –name is a parameter to give the container whatever friendly name you want to assign.

To access your Container command line, use the following command:

podman attach orca

You will see that your command prompt changes to your container ID:

[daniel@f420884c0802 /]#

To start your container, you can use the command below:

podman start container-id or name

To stop your container, you can use the following command:

podman stop container-id or name

For more information, you can visit the Podman Documentation page.

Conclusion

At this point, you have learned to Install and Use Podman on Centos 7.

Hope you enjoy it.

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