I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
Podman is not yet ready for mainstream, in my experience
My experience varies wildly from yours, so please don’t take this bit as gospel.
Have yet to find a container that doesn’t work perfectly well in podman. The options may not be the same. Most issues I’ve found with running containers boil down to things that would be equally a problem in docker. A sample:
- “rootless” containers are hard to configure. It can almost always be fixed with “–privileged” or some combination of permission flags. This would be equally true for docker; the only meaningful difference is podman tries to push everything into rootless. You don’t have to.
- network filesystems cause headaches, especially smbfs + sqlite app. I’ve had to use NFS or ext4 inside a network-mounted image for some apps. This problem is identical for docker.
- container networking–for specific cases–needs to managed carefully. These cases are identical for docker.
And that’s it. I generally run things once from the podman command line, then use podlet to create a quadlet out of that configuration, something you can’t do with docker. If you are having any trouble with running containers under podman, try the --privileged shortcut, see that it works, and then double back if you think you really need rootless.