newly-created images by builder not showing

[finanalyst]

Bug description

I use podman desktop, but need to use buildah sometimes for image creation.

• If podman desktop is open, and I create a new image with buildah, the new image does not appear.
• there does not appear to be a way to refresh the desktop's list of images

If the desktop is exited, then opened again, the image appears.

Even if not seeing a new image is not a bug, not being able to refresh the image list seems a poor UX

Operating system

Ubuntu 22,04

Installation Method

Flathub (Linux)

Version

1.14.1

Steps to reproduce

1. run podman-desktop
2. create a new image with a buildah script
3. look at the list of images
4. exit podman-desktop
5. open podman-destop
6. look at the list of images

Relevant log output

Additional context

No response

[finanalyst]

Further steps after creating a new image with a buildah script:

1. in terminal: podman images
2. in terminal: buildah images

Both report the new image with a date stamp of a few seconds.

3. inspect Podman desktop images pane

Only the older image with a date stamp considerably older, viz the previous images, is visible.

[benoitf]

hello, Podman Desktop is notified by events sent by the podman engine.

It looks that the 3rd party tooling (buildah will use the same storage) but podman is not triggering an event so Podman Desktop is not notified and then the list is not refreshed.

You can force a refresh of the image store if you click on the light bulb in the status bar then click on the 'stores' tab and then 'images' and click on refresh

[finanalyst]

@benoitf Thanks for this. After posting I found that invoking a container on the image from the CLI did, as you say, notify Podman Desktop, which then showed the new image in the images pane.

Thanks for showing how to refresh the images. It took me a while to find the light bulb - small font, bottom right. Also I discovered there is a lot of stuff in there. So my UX complaint is that for developers who use Podman Desktop, trouble shooting is likely to be important. I would suggest that it is moved to a more intuitive place similar to 'Settings'. I feel unconvinced that a lightbulb, which tends to indicate 'Tips' or 'Ideas' is a good indicator for 'Troubleshooting', which is why I hadnt clicked on it before. Having to click on every icon to find important stuff is somewhat frustrating.

[gastoner]

I would suggest to add a refresh button to images list like so:

[finanalyst]

Much better UX. Is this a production version of Podman?

[finanalyst]

I just tried to download 1.17. The link on the download page is to 1.16 Using flatpak. Or is this a different installation type. I use Ubuntu

[gastoner]

1.16 is currently latest production version, the the -next means development version BTW this is just an a quick local implementation, I've didn't create a PR for this yet. cc @benoitf do you think adding an additional button like this is an okay solution for this issue?

[benoitf]

On my end I don't see the need of this button displayed all the time. As it's the podman engine that is not sending an event (or buildah doing its own thing). UI is event based. Adding refresh buttons is to me an anti-pattern. (so it's a bug of the underlying layers (or missing this edge case if an image is added externally by buildah)

[finanalyst]

@benoitf Since the image does show up in Podman Desktop AFTER a container is created from the image, and the image is found using the refresh package sequence (via the tiny light bulb), I would AGREE that this is a problem where an underlying layer is not signalling the image creation. I also agree that a large 'refresh' button is probably over-kill, since the use scenario I have is likely to be rare. Since there are so many options, how about the ability to assign some UI sequence to a user facing button? So I could assign it to a package refresh, but some other developer could assign another sequence of steps.

[vancura]

FYI @MariaLeonova

[gastoner]

@benoitf shouldnt we rather add some mechanism to detect buildah build events? than adding some button etc?

[MariaLeonova]

@gastoner @benoitf do you suppose this can be done? Shall we work with the podman team to set that up?

Alternatively, could the system check every couple minutes if there's new images to be added to the list?

I would also wonder if there are any other cases, where users might want to refresh their lists of images? In that case, we could talk about adding a refresh button, which by no means has to be the same style (primary button), but could be something more subtle, as

I would also wonder if the other pages in Podman Desktop, such as Containers, Pods, Volumes, etc, would benefit from a refresh button?

[gastoner]

Closing this issue since adding the refresh button is an anti-pattern in Podman Desktop.

There is an option to refresh stores as in this video:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/4a3186b4-1e1c-43fb-99b5-9944b0fd2a5c