podman/DISTRO_PACKAGE.md

Podman Packaging

This document is currently written with Fedora as a reference, intended for use by packagers of other distros as well as package users.

Fedora Users

Podman v4 is available as an official Fedora package on Fedora 36 and rawhide. This version of Podman brings with it a new container stack called Netavark which serves as a replacement for CNI plugins (containernetworking-plugins on Fedora), as well as Aardvark-dns, the authoritative DNS server for container records.

Both Netavark and Aardvark-dns are available as official Fedora packages on Fedora 35 and newer versions and form the default network stack for new installations of Podman 4.0.

On Fedora 36 and newer, fresh installations of Podman v4 will automatically install Aardvark-dns along with Netavark.

To install Podman v4:

$ sudo dnf install podman

To update Podman from an older version to v4:

$ sudo dnf update podman

NOTE: Fedora 35 users will not be able to install Podman v4 using the default yum repositories and are recommended to use the COPR repo below:

$ sudo dnf copr enable rhcontainerbot/podman4

# install or update per your needs
$ sudo dnf install podman

After installation, if you would like to migrate all your containers to use Netavark, you will need to set network_backend = "netavark" under the [network] section in your containers.conf, typically located at: /usr/share/containers/containers.conf

Testing the latest development version`

If you would like to test the latest unreleased upstream code, try the podman-next COPR

$ sudo dnf copr enable rhcontainerbot/podman-next

$ sudo dnf install podman

CAUTION: The podman-next COPR provides the latest unreleased sources of Podman, Netavark and Aardvark-dns as rpms which would override the versions provided by the official packages.

Distro Packagers

The Fedora packaging sources for Podman are available at the Podman dist-git.

The main podman package no longer explicitly depends on containernetworking-plugins. The network stack dependencies are now handled in the containers-common package which allows for a single point of dependency maintenance for Podman and Buildah.

• containers-common

Requires: container-network-stack
Recommends: netavark

• netavark

Provides: container-network-stack = 2

• containernetworking-plugins

Provides: container-network-stack = 1

This configuration ensures:

• New installations of Podman will always install netavark by default.
• The containernetworking-plugins package will not conflict with netavark and users can install them together.

Listing bundled dependencies

If you need to list the bundled dependencies in your packaging sources, you can process the go.mod file in the upstream source. For example, Fedora's packaging source uses:

$ awk '{print "Provides: bundled(golang("$1")) = "$2}' go.mod | sort | uniq | sed -e 's/-/_/g' -e '/bundled(golang())/d' -e '/bundled(golang(go\|module\|replace\|require))/d'