Podman Desktop driver on Mac or Win (and Linux)

[afbjorklund]

We should test (and document) running the podman driver remotely, on non-Linux platforms.

Basically these platforms install podman-remote as podman, and run commands over varlink.

There is no documentation on how to set up the remote VM for Mac or Win, unfortunately...

The upstream install docs all assume that such a Linux host is already available over SSH:

https://podman.io/getting-started/installation

MacOS
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 in the podman-remote.conf file.

Windows
Podman is a tool for running Linux containers. You can do this from a Windows 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 in the podman-remote.conf file.

https://github.com/containers/libpod/blob/master/docs/source/markdown/podman-remote.conf.5.md

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Theoretically using podman-machine should work, as long as you use the systemd one:

https://boot2podman.github.io/2018/12/07/fedora-iso-variant.html

It is also possible to do it yourself, using the hypervisor of your choice... (and a Fedora ISO)

There is a walkthrough here: https://itnext.io/podman-and-skopeo-on-macos-1b3b9cf21e60

We need to document some minikube-specific configuration, like switching over to cgroupfs

[afbjorklund]

There's some minor differences, that we need to handle in code

Error: unrecognized command `podman cp`

Probably just use the regular "tee" workaround for this scenario.

podman cp /foo minikube:/bar --> podman-remote exec -i minikube tee /bar < /foo

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Added PR #8060 for this

This bug is containers/podman#4207

[afbjorklund]

Currently I am testing this locally, by renaming podman-remote to podman
And hacking all those various runtime.GOOS == "linux" tests into false.

Probably needs some better way of doing this globally, even if only for debugging.
For now we should just avoid using the "podman" driver outside of Linux...

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[cdbattags]

Hi folks, I got remote vm provisioning working with a combination of vagrant and virtualbox on macOS today using a combination of:

• Podman remote clients for macOS and Windows | Enable Sysadmin
• How to replace Docker with Podman on a Mac | Enable Sysadmin

Would we be willing to add the dependencies? Or with a podman system connection add we could let the users manage this themselves and just have minikube look at this configuration?

I'd love to leave Docker completely behind on macOS.

[afbjorklund]

@cdbattags : what did you use for the port forwarding, from the macOS host to the virtualbox VM ?

Currently using the minikube VM "directly" is the better option still, if not running Docker Desktop.

But eventually it should be possible to have minikube talk to a remote daemon or podman too.
Then you could supply your own VM to run remotely against, both for Docker and for Podman.

If this VM keeps running in the background, it might be "faster" to start/stop clusters on the VM.
That is, running containerd-in-docker or crio-in-podman rather than running directly on the VM.

I'd love to leave Docker completely behind on macOS.

You can still use Minikube with VirtualBox, without Docker.

If you want to use the minikube docker-env command, all you need is the docker CLI client.
But you can also use the new minikube image command, if all you need is "load" and "build".

[bkief]

Could podman commands be executed as wsl podman on windows and avoid the podman-remote?

[afbjorklund]

Possibly ? But then we need more parameters controlling how Podman is invoked...
It could do lima podman when on Mac (and Linux), that don't have a WSL VM.

[afbjorklund]

This has now moved into a new product called "Podman Desktop": https://podman-desktop.io/

It includes the podman (client and server program) and podman-machine orchestration tool