#podman Articles

A “real” RHEL container on a Fedora laptop, an Arch box for the AUR, an Ubuntu box for that one vendor tool that ships .deb files only, all of them with your home directory mounted, your shell history shared, and GUI apps that integrate into your desktop as if they were native. Distrobox uses Podman to make that boring instead of clever, and it pairs especially well with Atomic distributions where the host is meant to stay immutable.

A “control node” with a hand-curated venv works. Until it doesn’t. A colleague has different collection versions, CI installs a slightly newer Python library, and a playbook that ran yesterday now fails. Execution Environments turn the control node into a versioned container image. ansible-builder produces it, ansible-navigator runs against it, and the same artifact ships from your laptop into AAP/AWX without modification.

Hand-writing Quadlet files works for one host. For a fleet, the containers.podman collection’s native Quadlet generation lets you describe containers as Ansible state, including secrets, registry logins, and templated configuration. A small Mastodon welcome bot makes a concrete example.

Podman runs on FreeBSD too - but without systemd, the workflow is different. This follow-up to my Linux Podman deep dive covers how to run both native FreeBSD and Linux OCI containers on FreeBSD, how container lifecycle management works without Quadlets, and how Podman complements Jails rather than replacing them.

An opinionated production-ops guide to Podman on Linux servers - why I prefer it over Docker, how Quadlets replace Compose files, and practical patterns from real deployments including secrets management, auto-updates, and Docker compatibility.

Deploying Keycloak 26 as an identity provider using Podman Quadlets with network segmentation, secret management, and systemd integration.

Backups are the thing everyone knows they should do and nobody does well enough. Here’s my multi-stage strategy for keeping about a dozen servers safe: ZFS snapshots with sanoid, off-site replication with syncoid to rsync.net, Proxmox Backup Server with an S3 backend for VMs, and a creative Podman trick for backing up RHEL hosts that don’t have proxmox-backup-client. Plus a dead man’s switch, because the only thing worse than no backups is backups that silently stopped working three months ago.

Moving beyond “setenforce 0” - a practical guide to understanding, troubleshooting, and working with SELinux on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Podman 5.8 lands with multi-file Quadlet installs, automatic BoltDB-to-SQLite migration in preparation for Podman 6.0, and several quality-of-life improvements for container workflows.

A Practical Guide to build secure, maintainable multi-container applications with Podman