Podman daemonless architecture

Podman (short for POD MANager) is a daemonless container engine that enables users to manage containers, images, and their related resources such as storage volumes or network resources. First-time users installing Podman soon realize that there is no service to start after the installation is complete. No background running daemon is required to run containers with Podman!

Once installed, the Podman binary acts both as a command-line interface (CLI) and as a container engine that orchestrates the container runtime execution. The following subsections will explore the details of the Podman behavior and building blocks.

Podman commands and REST API

The Podman CLI provides a growing set of commands. The curated list is available at https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/Commands.html.

The following list explores a subset of the most commonly used commands:

• build: Build an image from a Containerfile or Dockerfile
• cp: Copy files/folders...