Introduction

Podman is a Docker-compatible alternative container runtime that, unlike Docker, is included in the Rocky Linux repositories and can run containers as a systemd service.

Install Podman

Use the dnf utility to install Podman:

dnf install podman

Adding a container

Let us run a Nextcloud self-hosted cloud platform as an example:

podman run -d -p 8080:80 nextcloud

You will receive a prompt to select the container registry to download from. In our example, we will use docker.io/library/nextcloud:latest.

Once you have downloaded the Nextcloud container, it will run.

Enter ip_address:8080 in your web browser (assuming you opened the port in firewalld) and set up Nextcloud:

Running containers as systemd services

As mentioned, you can run Podman containers as systemd services. Let us now do it with Nextcloud. Run:

podman ps
``

You will get a list of running containers:

```bash
04f7553f431a  docker.io/library/nextcloud:latest  apache2-foregroun...  5 minutes ago  Up 5 minutes  0.0.0.0:8080->80/tcp  compassionate_meninsky

As seen above, our container's name is compassionate_meninsky.

To make a systemd service for the Nextcloud container and enable it on reboot, run the following:

podman generate systemd --name compassionate_meninsky > /usr/lib/systemd/system/nextcloud.service
systemctl enable nextcloud

Replace compassionate_meninsky with your container's assigned name.

When your system reboots, Nextcloud will restart in Podman.

Author: Neel Chauhan

Contributors: Steven Spencer, Ganna Zhyrnova