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Podman for macOS (sort of)

February 12, 2020
Rarm Nagalingam
Related topics:
Containers

Share:

    I have a problem. My daily laptop is a MacBook Pro, which is great unless you want to dual boot into Linux and develop on containers. While it is simple enough to install Red Hat CodeReady Containers, what I really needed was a way to run Buildah, Podman, and skopeo on macOS without having to water and feed a Linux VM.

    Look no further: Podman-machine has somewhat solved this problem.

    Podman-machine

    Podman-machine starts a virtual machine that already streamlines the Podman, Buildah, and skopeo packages. The developers released two VM flavors: an in-memory Tiny Core and a Fedora version.

    You have the option of compiling additional driver support for hypervisors like xhyve, but I would recommend VirtualBox as it seems to work more smoothly.

    Getting started

    My instructions are based on the official ones here. The guide also assumes you have VirtualBox already installed.

    Start by downloading the latest podman-machine binary. At the time of this writing, the latest release was v0.16:

    $ curl -L https://github.com/boot2podman/machine/releases/download/v0.16/podman-machine.darwin-amd64 --output /usr/local/bin/podman-machine
    chmod +x 
    

    Setting up your VM

    Then, create a boot2podman VM. I am using a Fedora 31 virtual machine with 4GB of RAM, and I attached my local ~/Code directory to this VM.

    I updated the image to Fedora 31 and allowed rootless image building. The image should make it to the official repo. In the meantime, I referenced the development release below:

    $ podman-machine create --virtualbox-boot2podman-url https://github.com/snowjet/boot2podman-fedora-iso/releases/download/d1bb19f/boot2podman-fedora.iso --virtualbox-memory="4096" --virtualbox-share-folder ~/Code:code fedbox
    

    You now have a VM with a persistent disk for container images, but it runs the OS in memory. You can log into the VM and view your shared directory at /sf_code:

    $ podman-machine ssh fedbox
    
    ls /sf_code
    total 12
    drwxrwx---.  1 root vboxsf  128 Jan 13 21:15 .
    dr-xr-xr-x. 18 root root   4096 Jan 14 22:42 ..
    drwxrwx---.  1 root vboxsf  480 Aug 28 05:40 container-proj
    

    Setting up your container

    Now, let's run a container and communicate with it:

    $ podman-machine ssh fedbox
    $ podman run -p 8080:80/tcp --rm httpd
    Trying to pull docker.io/library/httpd...
    Getting image source signatures
    Copying blob 27298e4c749a done
    Copying blob 354e6904d655 done
    Copying blob 36412f6b2f6e done
    Copying blob 10e27104ba69 done
    Copying blob 8ec398bc0356 [======================================] 25.8MiB / 25.8MiB
    Copying config c2aa7e16ed [======================================] 7.2KiB / 7.2KiB
    Writing manifest to image destination
    Storing signatures
    ...
    [Thu Jan 16 01:28:19.051375 2020] [core:notice] [pid 1:tid 140000832345216] AH00094: Command line: 'httpd -D FOREGROUND'
    

    In another terminal, run:

    $ podman-machine ip fedbox
    192.168.99.122
    $ curl http://192.168.99.122:8080
    It works!
    

    Finally, you can create containers on your Mac and communicate with them.

    Closing your workspace

    To stop and clean up your workspace, run:

    $ podman-machine stop fedbox
    $ podman-machine rm fedbox
    

    Now you can easily build, run, and push containers from your Mac.

    Last updated: June 29, 2020

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