Podman appimage

This is a portable AppImage for podman.

This project was mostly created to ease the access to podman on platforms where it's not straightforward to get it from the package manager (e.g.: read-only rootfs) like SteamOS used on Valve's Steam Deck.

But it should also work as portable podman solution in any other environment.

The AppImage's entrypoint does the necessary setup to get a working environment and should generally be used in rootless mode (the user will be prompted for root access for the first time setup to configure the necessary files to get a working rootless mode). root mode does work too if really needed.

Releases

Head on over to the Releases for the latest builds.

Usage

By default launching the AppImage will open a podman-shell session:

In it you have access to the various podman commands: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/Commands.html

You can also rename the appimage or more practically, create a symlink to it to quickly access a specific binary.

For instance to access podman directly without going through the podman-shell you can do the following:

ln -s podman-*.AppImage podman

And invoke podman directly:

./podman info

The AppImage currently includes the following binaries:

btrfs            btrfs-image         catatonit  criu         docker          podman
btrfsck          btrfs-map-logical   compel     criu-ns      fsck.btrfs      podman-remote
btrfs-convert    btrfs-select-super  conmon     crun         fuse-overlayfs  podman-shell
btrfs-find-root  btrfstune           crit       crun.static  mkfs.btrfs      slirp4netns

Build

Install podman through your package manager and then simply run:

./build.sh

A podman-*.AppImage will created in the current folder.

CentOS 8 is used as base for building. At first CentOS 7 was considered but the systemd version was too old to build the most recent podman version and dependencies.

Credits

• Arch Linux for providing the build recipes for the packages and the wiki ressources
• podman for being an awesome container tool
• AppImage for being a very neat portable packaging solution