Install Podman on Debian 11

Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Podman on Debian 11.

Introduction to Podman

Podman is an alternative to Docker that is backed by Red Hat and IBM. The open-source project has a great ease of use, which is a big draw among developers.

Well, one of the differences is that it is not based on daemons (services in the *nix world). One of the advantages is that Docker has a single daemon that when it handles many containers grows and grows, becoming much heavier.

This last point is where Podman wants to be a solid alternative to Docker and is where Podman bases its reason.

As you would expect, Podman has great support for all the Linux distributions out there. This is also the case for Debian 11 where the installation is effortless.

Let’s go for it.

Installing Podman on Debian 11

For this post, we will use the root user. So, first update the distro completely.

apt update
apt upgrade

After that, you can check the information about the Podman package in the official Debian repositories.

apt show podman

Then, you can start the installation using the command

apt install podman
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  conmon containernetworking-plugins crun dirmngr gnupg gnupg-l10n gnupg-utils golang-github-containers-common golang-github-containers-image gpg gpg-agent
  gpg-wks-client gpg-wks-server gpgconf gpgsm libassuan0 libgpgme11 libksba8 libnpth0 libyajl2 pinentry-curses
Suggested packages:
  dbus-user-session pinentry-gnome3 tor parcimonie xloadimage scdaemon pinentry-doc containers-storage docker-compose
Recommended packages:
  buildah fuse-overlayfs slirp4netns catatonit | tini | dumb-init uidmap golang-github-containernetworking-plugin-dnsname
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  conmon containernetworking-plugins crun dirmngr gnupg gnupg-l10n gnupg-utils golang-github-containers-common golang-github-containers-image gpg gpg-agent
  gpg-wks-client gpg-wks-server gpgconf gpgsm libassuan0 libgpgme11 libksba8 libnpth0 libyajl2 pinentry-curses podman
0 upgraded, 22 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded.
Need to get 25.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 106 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Then, you can check the Podman version.

podman --version
podman version 3.0.1

It is also possible to get additional information about Podman. To do so, use this command

podman info

Configuring Podman in Debian 11

Before using Podman, we have to do a little configuration. Unlike Docker which only allows downloading images over the internet from Docker Hub, with Podman we will be able to use other functions.

So, edit the file /etc/containers/registries.conf.

nano /etc/containers/registries.conf

And at the end of the file, add the following information.

unqualified-search-registries = [ 'registry.access.redhat.com', 'registry.redhat.io', 'docker.io']

Save the changes and close the editor.

Basic Podman usage

The usage of Podman is quite similar to Docker. Therefore, we can search for images in the following way

podman search [image]

For example,

podman search httpd

Or if you want to download and use an image

podman pull [image_name]

And just like that, you can use Podman as a substitute for Docker.

Conclusion

Podman is an alternative to Docker that aims to unseat Docker and be the most popular container manager. In this short post, you have been able to know the process to install Podman.

Enjoy it.

Podman documentation