Useful Podman Commands¶

April 22, 2025

2 min read

Introduction¶

This article provides a collection of useful Podman commands and techniques for common container operations. Podman is a daemonless container engine that provides a Docker-compatible command line interface.

Squashing Container Images¶

Squashing container images reduces their size by combining multiple layers into one, making distribution more efficient.

podman build --layers --force-rm --squash-all --tag squashedimage - <<< "FROM registry/imagetosquash"

Container Run Commands¶

Here are several useful patterns for running containers with Podman:

Running a Gollum wiki server:

podman run --detach --name gollum --security-opt label=disable --userns=keep-id \
  -v /srv/wiki:/wiki -p 4567:4567 gollumwiki/gollum:master --default-keybind vim

Running a container with host networking:

podman run -d --network host -v /var/log/sshoney/:/root/logs/ --name sshoney 97f3876877e2

Running a MariaDB container in a pod:

podman run --detach --pod $POD_NAME \
  -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS \
  -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS \
  -e MYSQL_DATABASE=$DB_NAME \
  -e MYSQL_USER=$DB_USER \
  --name $CONTAINER_NAME_DB \
  -v "$PWD/database":/var/lib/mysql docker.io/mariadb:latest

Running a WordPress container in a pod:

podman run --detach --pod $POD_NAME \
  -e WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=127.0.0.1:3306 \
  -e WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=$DB_NAME \
  -e WORDPRESS_DB_USER=$DB_USER \
  -e WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS \
  --name $CONTAINER_NAME_WP \
  -v "$PWD/html":/var/www/html docker.io/wordpress

Image Transfer Between Systems¶

When direct registry access is unavailable, you can save and load images for transfer:

podman image save 97f3876877e2 -o 97f3876877e2.tgz
podman load --input 97f3876877e2.tgz

Systemd Integration with Quadlet¶

Note

podman generate systemd is deprecated since Podman 4.4. Use Quadlet instead: drop a .container unit file and systemd manages the lifecycle.

# Enable user services when logged out
loginctl enable-linger $USER

Create a Quadlet unit file:

~/.config/containers/systemd/my-app.container¶

[Container]
Image=docker.io/library/nginx:alpine
PublishPort=8080:80
Volume=%h/html:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro,Z

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

# Reload and start
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start my-app

Rootless Networking¶

Rootless containers use slirp4netns by default, with pasta as an alternative with better performance:

# Use pasta network driver (faster port forwarding)
podman run -d --network pasta -p 8080:80 nginx:alpine

# Create an isolated network for inter-container communication
podman network create my-net
podman run -d --network my-net --name db postgres:16-alpine
podman run -d --network my-net --name app -e DB_HOST=db my-app

Multi-Container Pods¶

Pods share network namespace, similar to a Kubernetes Pod:

# Create a pod exposing ports
podman pod create --name my-pod -p 8080:80 -p 3306:3306

# Add containers to the pod (they share localhost)
podman run -d --pod my-pod --name db \
  -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=secret \
  docker.io/mariadb:latest

podman run -d --pod my-pod --name web \
  docker.io/nginx:alpine

# Generate a Kubernetes-compatible YAML from a running pod
podman generate kube my-pod > my-pod.yaml