Podman
Daemonless OCI-compliant container runtime
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Podman (pod manager) is an open source Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant[2] container management tool created by Red Hat used for handling containers, images, volumes, and pods on the Linux operating system,[3] with support for macOS and Microsoft Windows via a virtual machine.[4] Based on the libpod library, it offers APIs for the lifecycle management of containers, pods, images, and volumes. The API is identical to the Docker API.[5] Podman Desktop provides an alternative to Docker Desktop.[6]
| Podman | |
|---|---|
| |
 Example of Podman commands | |
| Original author | Red Hat |
| Developer | Cloud Native Computing Foundation |
| Stable release | 5.7.1[1]
/ 10 December 2025 |
| Written in | Go |
| Operating system | Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD |
| Type | OS-level virtualization |
| License | Apache-2.0 license |
| Website | podman.io |
| Repository | |
History
The first public release of Podman (v0.2) was released in 2018, version 1.0.0 of Podman was released on January 16th, 2019.[7]
Version 1.0 of Podman Desktop was released on May 23, 2023.[8][9]
In KubeCon 2024, Red Hat announced that it will contribute Podman and Podman Desktop to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), by that point, Podman Desktop had already been downloaded 1.5 million times,[10] the projects were accepted into the CNCF on January 21, 2025.[11][12]
Adoption
In the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, among 20,070 survey respondents identifying as professionals, 10.9% said that they had used Podman in the past year, compared to 73.8% and 30.1% for Docker and Kubernetes respectively.[13]
Design
Security
Podman lets containers run without root privileges (rootless), meaning they can be created, run, and managed by regular users without administrator rights by using Linux namespaces.[16]
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