Podman Launcher

This project is a simple golang wrapper that uses embed to ship the latest release of https://github.com/mgoltzsche/podman-static/

That repo builds and releases all podman components as statically linked binaries this will let us to easily ship the container manager without needing all the dependency resolution of a package manager.

This project will take care of shipping the release (together with crun) and setting it up properly in order to work completely from $HOME, and without overlapping with a native podman installation.

Rootful podman works (if needed), and will unpack a copy of the binaries in /root for it to work.

Installation

Download the binary, make it executable and put it in your $PATH

Optionally, you can name it podman in order to make it easier to type/use

Usage

This launcher is transparent, so you will use it with all podman's flags and so on

Use in your project

You can use the podman-launcher as a library in your project, if you depend on podman and want to embed it as a dependency.

You'll need to embed the assets.tar.gz (that you'll find in the release page) in your application, and pass it to the launcher.Config struct for it to work

Example code:

package main

import (
    _ "embed"

	"github.com/89luca89/podman-launcher/pkg/launcher"
)

var assets []byte

func main() {
    conf := launcher.NewLauncher("/home/luca-linux/.podman-launcher", "/var/tmp", assets)

    command := []string{
        "podman",
        "run", "--rm", "-ti",
        "alpine:latest",
        "/bin/sh"
    }

	err := conf.Run(command)
	if err != nil {
		if exiterr, ok := err.(*exec.ExitError); ok {
			os.Exit(exiterr.ExitCode())
		}
	}
}

Upgrade

To update, download the new release, and with the new binary run podman-launcher upgrade to upgrade the embedded podman package.

Dependencies

On the system, the only dependencies needed are the one that podman needs. Specifically iptables and ip6tables for the bridge to work (not needed if using host's network namespace).

For rootless setup to work you need newuidmap and newgidmap binaries (usually part of the shadow package) and correctly set the /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid

Refer to the official documentation for further info: https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/rootless_tutorial.md

Compile

make clean
make

make download will download the latest bundles of crun and podman-static and prepare them for the launcher.

make podman-launcher will actually compile the main.go and embed the targz in it.

Use Cases

It's a nice-to-have for systems like the Steamdeck or where you're not allowed to modify the system in any way.

Thought to be a nice fallback container engine option for Distrobox (https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox)