Podman is a tool for managing OCI containers and pods, written in Go and available at podman.io. It provides a daemonless container management solution that runs on Linux while also supporting Mac and Windows systems through Podman-managed virtual machines. The project is built on libpod, a library for container lifecycle management that is included in this repository and exposes APIs for managing containers, pods, images, and volumes.
The scope of Podman encompasses comprehensive container and image management across multiple formats including OCI and Docker images. It handles the full lifecycle of containers from creation through running, checkpointing, restoring via CRIU, and removal. The tool supports pod management where groups of containers can share resources and be managed together. A key distinguishing feature is support for rootless operation, allowing containers and pods to run without root or elevated privileges. Podman uses user namespaces to isolate container root from the host, ensuring that rootless containers never have more privileges than the user launching them. The project integrates with Netavark for container networking and supports a Docker-compatible CLI interface that can manage containers both locally and on remote systems.
Podman operates without a manager daemon, reducing security risks and resource consumption at idle. It provides both a Docker-compatible REST API and an improved interface exposing advanced Podman functionality. The project maintains a structured release schedule with new major or minor releases four times yearly during the second week of February, May, August, and November, with patch releases occurring more frequently as needed. All releases are PGP signed by approved team members.
The repository demonstrates active community engagement with regular office hours and community meetings hosted through the CNCF and Linux Foundation. According to GitGenius activity tracking, the project shows strong responsiveness with a median issue and pull request response latency of 0.0 hours and a mean of 12.4 hours across 2814 tracked items. The most active issue labels are kind/bug with 1825 occurrences, locked issues with 1752 occurrences, and stale issues with 659 occurrences. Top contributors include Luap99 with 5263 tracked events, rhatdan with 1398 events, and mheon with 1109 events.
Podman integrates with several best-of-breed OCI projects and libraries including crun and runc for runtime, containers/image for image management, containers/storage for storage, Netavark and Aardvark for networking, Buildah for builds, and Conmon for monitoring OCI runtimes. The project explicitly excludes specialized image signing and pushing operations, directing users to Skopeo for those tasks, and does not implement the Kubernetes CRI interface, with CRI-O specializing in that area instead.
The repository is classified across multiple categories including docker-compatible, linux-containers, orchestration, microservices, rootless operation, cgroups, runc integration, systemd integration, OCI compliance, and security focus. It maintains connections with related projects including podman-desktop/podman-desktop, microsoft/vscode, and containers/podman through overlapping contributors.
