Container Desktop

Podman Desktop Companion

Documentation

Full project documentation lives in docs/:

• Architecture
  • Overview
  • Backend
  • Frontend
  • Connection startup
  • Engine matrix
  • Notes / principles
• Guides
  • Development
  • Testing
  • Usage
  • LIMA setup
• Project
  • TODO / roadmap
  • Changelog

IMPORTANT

• Podman offers an official cross-platform desktop UI available at Podman Desktop, give it a try.
• The container UI space is much more rich today, minimalist solutions exist, such as Pods, Podman TUI or feature rich ones such as Rancher Desktop

Author notes

• Podman Desktop Companion is considered complete, it started by offering a familiar experience, but it strives to offer its own identity.
• It will not be shut-down or archived unless required, it was the first cross-platform container UI before any other existing solution.
• There is great pride in this(mom is proud), no other benefits were obtained, no donations on patreon or ko-fi since inception.
• It was my first experience with the open source world as a creator and the one that made me never do it again, at least not on my own.
• Thank you to The Podman Team and to all the great persons I've met!

Scope

A familiar desktop graphical interface to the free and open container manager, podman!

Main goals

• Cross-platform desktop integrated application with consistent UI
• Learning tool for the powerful podman command line interface

Requirements

• Linux - Install podman - note that distributions usually have older versions of podman, see Aalvistack for the most recent repositories. Additional packages besides podman may be required, such as aardvark-dns and passt for networking (https://passt.top/passt/about/). If one wants to add support for docker container engine, the easiest is to install rootless docker as documented here https://linuxhandbook.com/rootless-docker/
• Windows - Install podman or provision your favorite WSL distribution with latest podman by following the instructions above for Linux. On your custom WSL distribution, a lightweight stdio relay bridges the engine's unix socket back to the Windows native context (named pipe ↔ wsl.exe stdio — no TCP listener or SSH server inside the distribution).
• MacOS - Install podman or lima

NOTE - To access and monitor remote ssh installations, properly set-up the connections in your $HOME/.ssh/config or $env:USERPROFILE/.ssh/config just like you do for Visual Studio Code remote extensions https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh - remote SSH connections use the native ssh client with host-key verification (StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new against known_hosts) and forward the engine's unix socket to a local socket only.

Usage

• See docs/usage.md

Podman is the driving engine

Multiple engines supported, familiar ones too

Comprehensive actions