I use podman on all of my production servers, and also inside of the Qubes system in Fedora VMs. A few days ago I saw this post and thought of trying out the steps on my Debian Buster system.

But, it seems it requires one more installation step, so I am adding the updated installation steps for Debian Buster here.

Install all build dependencies

sudo apt -y install \
  gcc \
  make \
  cmake \
  git \
  btrfs-progs \
  golang-go \
  go-md2man \
  iptables \
  libassuan-dev \
  libc6-dev \
  libdevmapper-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev \
  libgpgme-dev \
  libgpg-error-dev \
  libostree-dev \
  libprotobuf-dev \
  libprotobuf-c-dev \
  libseccomp-dev \
  libselinux1-dev \
  libsystemd-dev \
  pkg-config \
  runc \
  uidmap \
  libapparmor-dev \
  libglib2.0-dev \
  libcap-dev \
  libseccomp-dev

Install latest Golang

Download and install latest golang and also make sure that you have a proper $GOPATH variable. You can read more here.

Install conmon

conmon is the OCI container runtime monitor. Install it via the following steps:

git clone https://github.com/containers/conmon
cd conmon
make
sudo make podman
sudo cp /usr/local/libexec/podman/conmon  /usr/local/bin/

Install CNI plugins

git clone https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins.git $GOPATH/src/github.com/containernetworking/plugins
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/containernetworking/plugins
./build_linux.sh
sudo mkdir -p /usr/libexec/cni
sudo cp bin/* /usr/libexec/cni

Setup the bridge

sudo mkdir -p /etc/cni/net.d
curl -qsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/libpod/master/cni/87-podman-bridge.conflist | sudo tee /etc/cni/net.d/99-loopback.conf

Create the configuration files

Next, we need configuration files for the registries and also the policy file.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/containers
sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/projectatomic/registries/master/registries.fedora -o /etc/containers/registries.conf
sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/skopeo/master/default-policy.json -o /etc/containers/policy.json

Installing slirp4netns

slirp4netns is used for user-mode networking for unprivileged network namespaces. At the time of the writing this blog post, the latest release is 0.4.2.

git clone https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
cd slirp4netns
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Installing podman

Finally we are going to install podman.

git clone https://github.com/containers/libpod/ $GOPATH/src/github.com/containers/libpod
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/containers/libpod
make
sudo make install

Testing podman

Now you can test podman on your Debian system.

podman pull fedora:latest
podman run -it --rm /usr/bin/bash fedora:latest