Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running containers and container images. A container is a normal process that is run with constraints that allow the process to run in a controlled environment: providing portability and security to the user. However, containizerition constraints are exclusive features to the Linux kernel. This means Podman cannot run natively on any other operating system, which excludes a huge demographic of developers who do not use Linux as their primary operating system. The workaround to this is to run a Linux VM on their host operating system, and interface with a Podman backend on the VM. Manual installation and configuration of this VM can be time consuming and tedious.
The goal of this project is to be able to run Podman on non-Linux operating systems seamlessly and with a near-native experience. This means packaging the Podman client and VM to be installed easily, using a package manager such as Homebrew: thus abstracting away client-VM configurations and connections. After installation, Podman should have a near-native user experience: the user should be able to use Podman as if they were on a Linux machine. This ultimately would allow a previously-excluded demographic to be able to use Podman with quality and ease.
Red Hat Intern: Ashley Cui