Skip to Content

Podman Desktop

Posted on

In my previous post I mentioned several additional tools related to Podman… one of them being podman-desktop.

When using Docker I rarely used Docker Desktop. It’s easy enough to do ‘docker image ls’ but I know some people like GUIs so I thought I would install it and check it out.

Podman Desktop is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. On Linux it’s available as a Flatpak or a tar file. I simply downloaded the tar file and ran the executable inside.

~/Downloads/podman-desktop-0.9.1 ❯ ./podman-desktop

The layout and functionality is very similar to Docker Desktop and in fact you can also use Podman Desktop as a Docker Desktop replacment. It also supports Docker Desktop extensions.

Podman Desktop

You can view Containers, Images, Pods and Volumes.

The GUI does make viewing container information very easy. You can drill into a container and see:

  • Logs - see the console of the running application (very helpful for debugging)
  • Inspect - show info about your container
  • Terminal - shell into your running container
  • Details - gives you some brief summary info, if the container is running and a very small memory and CPU graph

You can also start, stop and delete your container.

Podman Desktop - Containers

Overall it appears to be very similar to Docker Desktop. I don’t think I would use it on a daily basis but it is very easy to download and install if needed.