Docker or podman?
Docker or podman?
Agreed. Hobwsly I use docker like snap these days. Need a specific version of node?
alias node="docker run --rm -ti -v '${PWD}:${PWD}' -w '${PWD}' node:16-alpine" alias npm="docker run --rm -ti -v '${PWD}:${PWD}' -w '${PWD}' node:16-alpine npm"Pretty much every CLI tool that isn’t super basic to install I do this with.
I would say podman by default. It has a better security architecture as it can run rootless.
However there are small differences from Docker so you may need use Docker if you are trying to run third-party services that rely on these differences.
You have a bunch of options:
kubectl run $NAME --image=$IMAGEthis just creates a pod running the specific image. If you kill the pod, or it terminates, it won’t be run again. In general though, you probably want to do some customization before running (maybe you need volumes, secrets, env, ports, labels, securityContext, etc.) and for that you can simply let kubectl generate the boilerplate YAML and then simply make some edit:
kubectl run $NAME --image=$IMAGE --dry-run=client -o yaml > mypod.yaml # edit mypod.yaml kubectl create -f mypod.yamlYou can do the same with a deployment or statefulset:
In case you don’t need anything fancy, the kubectl create subcommand allows you to create simple workload, so probably that’s the answer to your question.
It depends on what you want. Do you want containers that don’t blow away your firewall? Podman is nice, but docker can be configured a little to avoid this. Want things that autostart and don’t have issues with entry points that attempt to play with permissions/users? Docker or podman as root is necessary. Want reasonable compose support? Podman now needs a daemon/socket. Want to make build containers and not deal with permission/user remapping at all? Podman is really nice.
Do not attempt to use podman-compose. That app is dead.
Podman is significantly better if you want to leverage the Systemd integration it has out of the box.
But if you just want to run existing docker-compose scripts then Docker is easier.
If you’re just starting out and have never used containers before start with regular (rootful) docker. It’s a much simpler mechanism to understand for a beginner and has more widespread support and documentation.
Once you understand containers and have used them for a few months you can start going down the rabbit hole, there’s no shortage of technologies to explore.
Or, if you’re only interested in self-hosting as a hobby and docker does what you need, you can also stop there. Not everybody needs a deep dive into technology.
I use podman with the podman-docker compatibility layer and native docker-compose. Podman + podman-docker is a drop-in replacement for actual docker. You can run all the regular docker commands and it will work. If you run it as rootful, it behaves in exactly the same way. Docker-compose will work right on top of it.
I prefer this over native Docker because I get the best of both worlds. All the tutorials and guides for Docker work just fine, but at the same time I can explore Podman’s rootless containers. Plus I enjoy it’s integration with Cockpit.
I personally prefer podman, due to its rootless mode being "more default" than in docker (rootless docker works, but it's basically an afterthought).
That being said: there's just so many tutorials, tools and other resources that assume docker by default that starting with docker is definitely the less cumbersome approach. It's not that podman is signficantly harder or has many big differences, but all the tutorials are basically written with docker as the first target in mind.
In my homelab the progression was docker -> rootless docker -> podman and the last step isn't fully done yet, so I'm currently running a mix of rootless docker and podman.
This website is deprecated.
It’s kept around mainly for historical reasons.
I’ve tried Docker Swarm because Kubernetes seemed like an overkill for a cluster of 4 small-ish servers. There have been several issues (networking for example) that took me two days to solve - by reinstalling the machine completely.
There are some hoops and hurdles along the way, some command will just literally brick your cluster without any notice whatsoever (like removing the second manager, leaving only one and cluster stops responding, but you get no warning that’s gonna happen).
Also secrets, where there is no simple way to manage them, or replace them. You can’t just replace a secret, you have to remove and recreate it. Which means turning off the service or creating a new secret with a different name and do a rolling update, which is just annoying to do every time unless you can afford a robust CI CD pipeline code that does it automatically.
I really thought swarm was dead :)
To be honest, some kubernetes distributions make the cluster operations minimal (I use k0s managed via ansible)!
Either way, the moment you go from N containers on one box to N containers on M boxes you need to start considering how to handle stateful applications, load balancing, etc. And that in general requires knowledge on a domain which is different from having simply applications wrapped in containers locally.
Podman is slightly better, but most tutorials are for docker.
So, podman if you’re comfortable looking through docs, man-pages, scarce Internet resources, and trial and error for finding things out. Especially if you care about having better security with rootless mode.
Podman also has a different way for managing many containers at once, and the interaction between them.
They both kind of suck in their own way.
If you want to things to run at startup and you’re not on systemd, rootless docker is probably easier.
Otherwise podman is mostly fine but be careful of native overlay if you’re not on BTRFS, this causes some pretty long build times.
Takes 1 minute to write a non systemd startup script, come on.
I understand systemd “spoiled” people, but not having a potentially insecure always running daemon for no purpose at all (docker) beat the alternative for me.
The Podman developers did contribute to Docker for a while before starting the project. Docker kept introducing issues and had some fundamentally bad design decisions that they didn’t want to change.
At least try to look into the history of these things before making broad and easily falsifiable statements.
Real men use Incus NixOS containers for reproducible builds instead of wimpy dockerfiles 😤😤
/s – for real though, I hope someday you finally remove the stick from where the sun doesn’t shine ;)
Did it sound cold? Because I didn’t mean that, I just meant to actually answer the question from my PoV. Just for the record, I also did not down vote you.
So yeah, use whatever footgun you prefer, I don’t judge :)
Definitely podman + podman compose.
Its fully open source (docker isn’t) and its secure by design (security has been added to docker as an after fought).
Also podman is rootless by design, docker takes a bit of effort to run root less.
I like podman because rootless and daemonless are built-in and default. Yes, it can be done on docker, but you have to do a bunch of shit to get it set up.
You could create the alias alias docker=“podman” and 99% of the time, you won’t even be able to tell the difference since podman is a docker drop in replacement. All the docker documentation applies to podman as well. But since docker runs as root by default, some edge cases might not work out of the box (like binding to a port on the host less than 1000).
Podman comes with some neat tools like being able to create systemd service files to start and stop containers as services.
To use docker-compose, you’ll need some additional packages. That’s probably the biggest drawback to podman imo. Podman wants to use pods instead of docker-compose, but I think they gotta take their heads out of their asses and just support the more popular format on that one. Not to mention docker-compose is just plain better imo. Easier to define, easier to understand, easier to modify. The list goes on and on.
You could create the alias alias docker=“podman”
There’s even an official Debian package that takes care of this for you: packages.debian.org/bookworm/podman-docker