In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Podman on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Podman can be defined as a tool designed for managing containers and pods without requiring a container daemon. All the containers and Pods are created as child processes of the Podman tool. Podman’s CLI is based on the Docker CLI. Just like Docker, it helps developers to develop, manage, and run their applications on containers.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Podman on a CentOS 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Podman on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Podman on CentOS 8.

Run the command below to install Podman on your CentOS system:

sudo dnf install podman

Check the version of Podman:

podman --version

Step 3. How to use Podman.

Now that Podman has been installed in our CentOS system, it’s time to start playing with it:

# Pull image
$ podman pull ubuntu
$ podman pull centos

# List existing images
$ podman images
REPOSITORY                 TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
docker.io/library/ubuntu   latest   775349758637   3 weeks ago   66.6 MB
docker.io/library/alpine   latest   965ea09ff2eb   5 weeks ago   5.82 MB
docker.io/library/centos   latest   0f3e07c0138f   7 weeks ago   227 MB

To download your preferred image, simply use the syntax:

podman pull image

For example, to download the Ubuntu image run:

podman pull ubuntu

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Podman. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Podman on CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Podman website.