Podman Desktop Companion— The Super Duper UI

Introduction

We very much like CLIs (command line interfaces) as the next DevOps guys, but even we can confess that we will surrender ourselves to a pretty UI along with a good user experience (ex: ArgoCD).

If you have following us, you may have noticed that we enjoy using Podman anywhere we can as a light weight alternative to Docker. If you don't know what Podman is, you can checkout another of our stories Dethroning Docker — The New Stack (podman, buildah, skopeo).

A final piece of the puzzle, much like the Portainer for Docker, is finally here. In this article, we will be exploring Podman Desktop Companion, which is a GUI for Podman AND it also works for traditional Docker.

Installation

Podman Desktop Companion is fully cross-platform, meaning there are distributions for Windows, Linux and MacOS (both x86 and arm cpu architectures supported). NOT to be confused with Podman Desktop which is a different project.

In this article, we will focus on Linux, Ubuntu 22.04 in particular.

Unfortunately, while Podman itself is already available in Ubuntu’s default repos, the Podman Desktop Companion is not yet available at the time of writing this. Nonetheless, the installation process is very simple.

Podman Desktop Companion is available in AppImage, Flatpak, rpm, and deb distributions. For the purpose of this demonstration, we will use the Debian package.

1. Download the file (you can get the links from the Podman Desktop Companion Page or GitHub). Ex: wget https://github.com/iongion/podman-desktop-companion/releases/download/3.4.2-alpha.4/podman-desktop-companion_3.4.2-alpha.4_amd64.deb
2. Install the package — sudo apt install -f ./podman-desktop-companion_3.4.2-alpha.4_amd64.deb
3. Profit…

If everything went smoothly, you should be able to use Activities to find and run the new Podman Desktop Companion.