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Podman

A daemonless container engine compatible with the Docker CLI.

Podman runs OCI containers without a long-running root daemon. Each container is a child of the user that started it, which lets ordinary users run containers without administrative privileges and without granting them docker-group access (which on Docker is effectively root). The CLI is largely compatible with Docker — most "docker run" commands work unchanged when invoked as "podman run".

The "rootless" model has security implications worth noting: containers run as unprivileged users and cannot do many things that Docker containers running as root can. For most development and many production workloads this is a desirable constraint. The Pod abstraction (groups of containers sharing a network namespace) is borrowed from Kubernetes, making local development of multi-container applications more pod-shaped.

Red Hat develops Podman as part of the broader Containers project. Podman ships as the default container engine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and later, on Fedora, on CentOS Stream, and on several other Red Hat-adjacent distributions. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed and is widely used as a Docker replacement in environments where the lack of a daemon is a feature rather than a friction.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install podman
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install podman
Arch:          sudo pacman -S podman
macOS:         brew install podman