How To Install Podman on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Podman on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Podman is a container tool for virtualizing applications. It was originally developed by Red Hat and originated in the Cri-O project, which develops a lightweight container runtime environment alternative to the Docker runtime environment. Podman distinguishes itself from its competitors by allowing you to run Containers in both root and rootless modes. Additionally, Podman isn’t a running service, meaning that it’s daemons.

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 the Podman on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies.
• 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 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Podman on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, the Podman is available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to install the latest version of Podman to your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt install podman

Now check the version of the installed Podman using the following command:

podman -v

You can also see detailed information about Podman with the following command:

podman info

Step 3. Configure Podman Registry.

By default, the Podman registry is not configured to download and install container images from the web, hence we need to do that manually so that we can use popular repositories such as Docker.io, and Fedora:

nano /etc/containers/registries.conf

Add the following lines:

[registries.search]
registries=["registry.access.redhat.com", "registry.fedoraproject.org", "docker.io"]

Step 3. How to use Podman.

Just like Docker, we can use the Podman command line to search Images but from different repositories, added in the previous step. You can search for the Podman images in the registries you have specified as:

podman search debian

Next, download the latest Debian image from the internet using the following command:

podman pull debian

If you have downloaded multiple images and now want to see what are the available images on your system, we can list all of them using the given command:

podman images

Additionally, you can view the running containers by using this command:

sudo podman ps -a

You can list all Podman command options with the following command:

podman --help

Output:

Manage pods, containers and images

Usage:
  podman [options] [command]

Available Commands:
  attach      Attach to a running container
  auto-update Auto update containers according to their auto-update policy
  build       Build an image using instructions from Containerfiles
  commit      Create new image based on the changed container
  container   Manage containers
  cp          Copy files/folders between a container and the local filesystem
  create      Create but do not start a container
  diff        Display the changes to the object's file system
  events      Show podman events
  exec        Run a process in a running container
  export      Export container's filesystem contents as a tar archive
  generate    Generate structured data based on containers, pods or volumes
  healthcheck Manage health checks on containers
  help        Help about any command
  history     Show history of a specified image
  image       Manage images
  images      List images in local storage
  import      Import a tarball to create a filesystem image
  info        Display podman system information
  init        Initialize one or more containers
  inspect     Display the configuration of object denoted by ID
  kill        Kill one or more running containers with a specific signal
  load        Load image(s) from a tar archive
  login       Login to a container registry
  logout      Logout of a container registry
  logs        Fetch the logs of one or more containers
  machine     Manage a virtual machine
  manifest    Manipulate manifest lists and image indexes
  mount       Mount a working container's root filesystem
  network     Manage networks
  pause       Pause all the processes in one or more containers
  play        Play containers, pods or volumes from a structured file
  pod         Manage pods
  port        List port mappings or a specific mapping for the container
  ps          List containers
  pull        Pull an image from a registry
  push        Push an image to a specified destination
  rename      Rename an existing container
  restart     Restart one or more containers
  rm          Remove one or more containers
  rmi         Removes one or more images from local storage
  run         Run a command in a new container
  save        Save image(s) to an archive
  search      Search registry for image
  secret      Manage secrets
  start       Start one or more containers
  stats       Display a live stream of container resource usage statistics
  stop        Stop one or more containers
  system      Manage podman
  tag         Add an additional name to a local image
  top         Display the running processes of a container
  unmount     Unmounts working container's root filesystem
  unpause     Unpause the processes in one or more containers
  unshare     Run a command in a modified user namespace
  untag       Remove a name from a local image
  version     Display the Podman version information
  volume      Manage volumes
  wait        Block on one or more containers

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Podman. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Podman on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the Podman website.