What's the status on ease of running on Mac? I know last time I seriously considered testing it out in my workflow, it was kind of crazy that I had to have a separate machine (VM or real) just to run container images...
I see in the docs [1]:
"Podman is a tool for running Linux containers. You can do this from a MacOS desktop as long as you have access to a linux box either running inside of a VM on the host, or available via the network. You need to install the remote client and then setup ssh connection information."
And yes, I know that Docker (and any other Linux container-based tool) also runs a VM—but it sets it up almost 100% transparently for me. I install docker, I run `docker run` and I have a container running.
> I know last time I seriously considered testing it out in my workflow, it was kind of crazy that I had to have a separate machine (VM or real) just to run container images...
Why does that seem 'kind of crazy' to you? A container is really just a namespaced Linux process, so … you either need a running Linux kernel or a good-enough emulation thereof.
What seems kind of crazy to me is that so many folks who are deploying on Linux develop on macOS. That's not a dig against macOS, but one against the inevitable pains which arise when developing in one environment and deploying in another. Even though I much prefer a Linux environment, it would seem similarly crazy to develop on Linux and deploy on Windows or macOS. Heck, I think it is kind of crazy to develop on Ubuntu and deploy on Debian, and they are generally very very close!
The docker machine or whatever it’s called these days is pretty impressive but when we’ve tried to use it in developer workflows on mac it would eat all of the CPU allotted to it in order to marshal filesystem events over the host/guest VM boundary. We tried a number of workarounds but none solved the problem. I’m sure it’s possible, but we ultimately gave up and moved back to developing against native processes on MacOS.
this is an issue I have battled as well. Docker is great for normalizing the execution environment; which should be a huge boon for developer tooling but on MacOS having your laptop sound like a hovercraft just to have some files watched for hot rebuilds is no bueno.
It seems like they haven't gotten to this, don't understand the needs and the potential, or aren't doing this intentionally. My understanding is that Docker maintains what amounts to a wrapper VM with nice integration to enable the workflow. This doesn't exist for Podman as far as I've seen.
On Windows, the WSL2 feature gives you that easy wrapper in a different way. It's sets up and manages the underlying VM although you have to choose your distro etc. Once this is running after a simple setup you are just using Linux from that point on. It's less specialized than how Docker on macOS seems to work.
If someone knows of something that follows the WSL2 approach without VirtualBox or VMware Fusion I'd be all ears. That would be more versatile than how Docker seems to work right now. Docker's business interests probably aligned well with getting a workflow running, so unless someone is motivated to do similar for Podman, you are going to be out of luck. At least recognizing this deficiency would be a start though.
> And yes, I know that Docker (and any other Linux container-based tool) also runs a VM—but it sets it up almost 100% transparently for me. I install docker, I run `docker run` and I have a container running.
That's exactly not true, considering you said Linux.
The utility of Linux containers is that they share the same OS instance, but have an embellished notion of Unix process group where, within a container i.e. embellished process group, they see their own filesystem and numbering for OS resources, AS IF they were on individual VMs, but they're not.
> it was kind of crazy that I had to have a separate machine (VM or real) just to run container images...
Containers use Linux namespaces to decouple from the main OS. MacOS doesn't support those, so no matter what you do, you can't run them directly on MacOS. That's why you need a VM, and you need the WSL Windows subsystem for Linux on Windows.
BSD has jails, but they don't have the same functionality. In particular, I sorely miss the network namespace that Linux has on MacOS.
> And yes, I know that Docker (and any other Linux container-based tool) also runs a VM—but it sets it up almost 100% transparently for me. I install docker, I run `docker run` and I have a container running.
Comments like this help reinforce the stereotype of lazy macos developers ;)
I see in the docs [1]:
"Podman is a tool for running Linux containers. You can do this from a MacOS desktop as long as you have access to a linux box either running inside of a VM on the host, or available via the network. You need to install the remote client and then setup ssh connection information."
And yes, I know that Docker (and any other Linux container-based tool) also runs a VM—but it sets it up almost 100% transparently for me. I install docker, I run `docker run` and I have a container running.
[1] https://podman.io/getting-started/installation#macos