For the last week or so, I have spent measurable time experimenting with RHEL’s Podman. A few months back with the RHEL 8 release, Red Hat officially dropped support for Docker. Podman is Red Hat’s answer to Docker. Podman is a daemon-less container runtime engine. There is however, very great news as from what I’ve noticed so far is that Podman’s CLI commands are compatible with Docker’s (Docker CLI reference). This means that with a simple alias for docker=podman, existing CLI that you may already know works perfectly as it would with Docker.

Simple alias:

alias docker=podman

Or to make the alias permanent:

echo “docker=’podman'” >> ~/.bash_aliases && source ~/.bash_aliases

So, Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker, yet it does not have a daemon. It uses the same CLI as docker, and can even be alias’d so copy and pasting existing instructions work flawlessly. Another great feature is that if Red Hat does not have an image you are looking for, or you have an image from Docker Hub that you prefer, on creation if the image is not hosted by Red Hat podman will search Docker Hub next.

Another great tool is Red Hat’s Cockpit. Cockpit is a web-based admin console that even contains a terminal for controlling the system through your web browser. It reminds me of Windows Admin Center in a lot of ways. It also has a nifty Podman image and container management page that I like even more than Portainer.