Running your first container

Now, it’s time to finally run our first container.

In the previous section, we uncovered how to install Podman on our favorite Linux distribution, as well as what’s included in the base packages once installed. Now, we can start using our daemonless container engine.

Running containers in Podman is handled through the podman run command, which accepts many options for controlling the behavior of the just ran container, its isolation, its communication, its storage, and so on.

The easiest and shortest Podman command for running a brand-new container is as follows:

$ podman run <imageID>

We have to replace the imageID string with the image name/location/tag we want to run. If the image is not present in the cache or we have not downloaded it before, Podman will pull the image for us from the respective container registry.

Interactive and pseudo-tty

To introduce this command and its options, let’s start simple...