Podman Compose

An implementation of Compose Spec with Podman backend. This project focus on:

• rootless
• daemon-less process model, we directly execute podman, no running daemon.

This project only depend on:

• podman
• Python3
• PyYAML
• python-dotenv

And it's formed as a single python file script that you can drop into your PATH and run.

References:

• spec.md
• docker-compose compose-file-v3
• docker-compose compose-file-v2

Alternatives

As in this article you can setup a podman.socket and use unmodified docker-compose that talks to that socket but in this case you lose the process-model (ex. docker-compose build will send a possibly large context tarball to the daemon)

For production-like single-machine containerized environment consider

• k3s | k3s github
• MiniKube

For the real thing (multi-node clusters) check any production OpenShift/Kubernetes distribution like OKD.

Versions

If you have legacy version of podman (before 3.x) you might need to stick with legacy podman-compose 0.1.x branch. The legacy branch 0.1.x uses mappings and workarounds to compensate for rootless limitations.

Modern podman versions (>=3.4) do not have those limitations and thus you can use latest and stable 1.x branch.

Installation

Install latest stable version from PyPI:

pip3 install podman-compose

pass --user to install inside regular user home without being root.

Or latest development version from GitHub:

pip3 install https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/archive/devel.tar.gz

or

curl -o /usr/local/bin/podman-compose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/devel/podman_compose.py
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podman-compose

or inside your home

curl -o ~/.local/bin/podman-compose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/devel/podman_compose.py
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/podman-compose

or install from Fedora (starting from f31) repositories:

sudo dnf install podman-compose

Basic Usage

We have included fully functional sample stacks inside examples/ directory.

A quick example would be

cd examples/busybox
podman-compose --help
podman-compose up --help
podman-compose up

A more rich example can be found in examples/awx3 which have

• A Postgres Database
• RabbitMQ server
• MemCached server
• a django web server
• a django tasks

When testing the AWX3 example, if you got errors just wait for db migrations to end.

Tests

Inside tests/ directory we have many useless docker-compose stacks that are meant to test as much cases as we can to make sure we are compatible