Install and Use Podman on AlmaLinux 9

This guide intends to teach you to Install and Use Podman on AlmaLinux 9.

Podman is an open-source, Linux-native tool designed to develop, manage, and run containers and pods under the Open Container Initiative (OCI) standards. Presented as a user-friendly container orchestrator developed by Red Hat, Podman is the default container engine in RedHat 8 and CentOS 8.

It is one of a set of command-line tools designed to handle different tasks of the containerization process, that can work as a modular framework. This set includes:

Podman – pods and container image manager
Buildah – a container builder
Skopeo – a container image inspection manager
runc – container runner and feature builder to podman and buildah
crun – optional runtime that allows greater flexibility, control, and security for rootless containers

These tools can also work with any OCI-compatible container engine, like Docker, making it easy to transition to Podman or use it with an existing Docker installation.

Steps To Install and Use Podman on AlmaLinux 9

To complete this guide, you must log in to your server as a non-root user with sudo privileges. To do this, you can follow our guide the Initial Server Setup with AlmaLinux 9.

Install Podman on AlmaLinux 9

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

sudo dnf update && sudo dnf upgrade

Podman packages are available in the default AlmaLinux repository. So use the following command to install Podman on your server:

sudo dnf install podman -y

Then, verify your installation by checking its version:

podman --version

Output
podman version 4.2.0

Start and Enable Podman Service

Start and enable your Podman service by using the following commands:

# sudo systemctl start podman
# sudo systemctl enable podman

Check your podman service is active and running on AlmaLinux 9:

sudo systemctl status podman

Output
● podman.service - Podman API Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/podman.service; enabled; vendor pr>
     Active: active (running) since Mon 2023-01-16 08:20:49 EST; 2s ago
TriggeredBy: ● podman.socket
       Docs: man:podman-system-service(1)
   Main PID: 72191 (podman)
      Tasks: 7 (limit: 23609)
     Memory: 21.1M
        CPU: 132ms
     CGroup: /system.slice/podman.service
...

To get full information about Podman, you can use:

podman info

Output 
host:
  arch: amd64
  buildahVersion: 1.27.1
  cgroupControllers:
  - cpuset
  - cpu
  - io
  - memory
  - hugetlb
  - pids
  - rdma
  - misc
  cgroupManager: systemd
  cgroupVersion: v2
  conmon:
    package: conmon-2.1.4-1.el9.x86_64
...

When your installation is completed, you can proceed to the next step to install Podman compose.

Set up Podman Compose

If you plan to use Docker Compose with Podman backend to make it run docker-compose.yml unmodified and rootless or create a new one can use the following command. In short, it is a drop-in replacement for docker-compose.

First, install the Epel repository on AlmaLinux 9:

sudo dnf install epel-release -y

Then, use the following command to install Podman Compose:

sudo dnf install podman-compose -y

Use docker as a command tool instead of Podman (optional)

To use docker as a command tool instead of Podman, you can install the podman-docker.

This means you can use the familiar docker command while underlying Podman will be executing.

sudo dnf install podman-docker

Then, check the versions:

podman -v
or
docker -v

These will give you the same result.

Output
Emulate Docker CLI using podman. Create /etc/containers/nodocker to quiet msg.
podman version 4.2.0

Use Podman on AlmaLinux 9

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 an AlmaLinux container using Podman, then you can search what are the images available through the different repositories.

podman search almalinux

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

podman pull almalinux

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/almalinux  latest      acaca326f3b3  6 weeks ago  196 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 AlmaLinux image with Podman. Now we will show how to use it to create a container using AlmaLinux Image.

To do this, you can use the following command: