Overview
Podman is a container management tool included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It allows you to build, run, and manage containers, similar to Docker, is daemonless, and is designed to integrate securely with Linux user namespaces. It supports the same container image format as Docker, so most Docker images work out of the box. However, unlike Docker, Podman runs in rootless mode by default, meaning it doesn’t require administrative privileges, making it safer for student environments.
Support and Policy
Podman is configured to work in our environment on fully-managed Linux systems. Podman is only supported in its current configuration as deployed by Michigan Tech IT on these systems; changes to Podman’s configuration are not supported by Michigan Tech IT.
Michigan Tech IT is unable to provide support for the containers themselves or anything running inside a container. This includes installed software, libraries, scripts, or projects within the container. Users are responsible for managing their own containers and their contents.
If you encounter issues using Podman as documented in the example below, please contact IT Support through the IT Help Desk.
Podman storage configuration
Container images and related data are not stored in your network home directory, but locally under a directory that is configured like your user’s 30-day scratch space:
/srv/containers/<username>/
This location is temporary storage and may be cleared automatically after 30 days or when disk space becomes limited. Data in this directory is not backed up and will not persist across machines or rebuilds.
If you log into a different system, your containers and images will not be available and will need to be re-pulled or rebuilt.
For more details about the 30-day scratch space, refer to Knowledge Base - Temporary scratch space (Linux)
Example
To pull and run a basic container and get an interactive shell inside it, run:
podman run -it registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9/ubi /bin/bash
The command prompt will change to be similar to:
[root@d16bb90895ce /]#
Once done with the container, use the "exit" command to close the shell and the container should also stop running.
Additional Resources