There is podman-compose, but it is most definitely missing features vs. docker-compose (as in whole subcommands are absent). I cannot remember what (if any) missing podman features remain, but I do run into occasional bugs and regressions with certain functionality.
Curious you mention needing `--format=docker`; I’ve pushed images to Docker Hub without doing that without issue.
https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
In Fedora 33containers
podman-compose
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containers / podman-compose
podman-compose
a script to run docker-compose.yml using podman
32Distinct people
35Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
a script to run docker-compose.yml using podman
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by year35 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-09-12 05:00:24 UTC to 2026-07-03 08:09:47 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
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View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 1 | 6 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 0 | 8 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Podman Compose
An implementation of Compose Spec with Podman backend.
This project focuses on:
rootless
daemon-less process model, we directly execute podman, no running daemon.
This project only depends on:
podman
a podman network backend with DNS name resolution available. This allows containers to be able to resolve each other if they are on the same network.
either: podman dnsname plugin with CNI network backend: It is usually found in the podman-plugins or podman-dnsname distro packages, those packages are not pulled by default and you need to install them.
or: netavark/aardvark-dns: Both are usually installed on new installations of podman 4.
Python 3.9 or newer
PyYAML
python-dotenv
And it's formed as a single Python file script that you can drop into your PATH and run.
References:
spec.md
docker-compose compose-file-v3
docker-compose compose-file-v2
Alternatives
As in this article you can setup a podman.socket and use unmodified docker-compose that talks to that socket but in this case you lose the process-model (ex. docker-compose build will send a possibly large context tarball to the daemon)
For production-like single-machine containerized environment consider
k3s | k3s github
MiniKube
For the real thing (multi-node clusters) check any production
OpenShift/Kubernetes distribution like OKD.
Versions
If you have legacy version of podman (before 3.1.0) you might need to stick with legacy podman-compose 0.1.x branch.
The legacy branch 0.1.x uses mappings and workarounds to compensate for rootless limitations.
Modern podman versions (>=3.4) do not have those limitations, and thus you can use latest and stable 1.x branch.
If you are upgrading from podman-compose version 0.1.x then we no longer have global option -t to set mapping type
like hostnet. If you desire that behavior, pass it the standard way like network_mode: host in the YAML.
Installation
Pip
Install the latest stable version from PyPI:
pip3 install podman-compose
pass --user to install inside a regular user's home without being root.
Or latest development version from GitHub:
pip3 install https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/archive/main.tar.gz
Package repositories
podman-compose is available from the following package repositories:
Debian:
sudo apt install podman-compose
Fedora (starting from f31) repositories:
sudo dnf install podman-compose
Homebrew:
brew install podman-compose
Generate binary using docker/podman locally
This script will download the repo, generate the binary using this Dockerfile, and place the binary in the directory where you called this script.
sh -c "$(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/main/scripts/download_and_build_podman-compose.sh)"
Manual
curl -o /usr/local/bin/podman-compose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/main/podman_compose.py
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podman-compose
or inside your home
curl -o ~/.local/bin/podman-compose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/main/podman_compose.py
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/podman-compose
Tests
podman-compose is tested via unit and integration tests.
Unit tests can be run via the following:
python3 -m unittest discover tests/unit
Integration tests can be run via the following:
python3 -m unittest discover tests/integration
Contributing guide
If you are a user or a developer and want to contribute please check the CONTRIBUTING section
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
4 sourcesFor starters, Podman doesn't support anything like Docker Compose ( https://docs.docker.com/compose/ ) out of the box, which makes it harder to orchestrate deployments that need multiple containers locally.
There is podman-compose as a drop-in ( https://github.com/containers/podman-compose ), but last i checked it wasn't supported by or developed by RedHat themselves, hence no first-party support. In addition to that, the feature parity just isn't there.
Also, there is no docker.sock, which tools like Portainer ( https://www.portainer.io/ ) need to interface with Docker, hence no control web apps and other tools are available for Podman.
Besides that, there is also Docker Swarm ( https://docs.docker.com/engine/swarm/ ), a lightweight orchestrator which can be a simpler alternative to Kubernetes in smaller and more resource constrained env
Read the rest
ironments, which isn't available in Podman. In addition to that, Docker Swarm's deployment format is also extremely similar to the Docker Compose one (with additional functionality added for multi node clusters), which allowed for getting started with container orchestration in a more simple fashion.
If you're in a Kubernetes shop and simply need something for Kubernetes to interface with, then containerd (which Docker uses internally) and Podman are largely comparable.
In other circumstances, Podman doesn't have complete feature parity with Docker, despite popular claims and despite its architectural improvements.
podman-compose works fine for me, despite being advertised as "still under development".
https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
In Linux containers in a few lines of codeNot that it's exactly relevant to this article, but on RHEL 8, at least, Docker isn't supported, and instead they use their own container runtime called Podman along with Buildah for building them.
Podman does not run as root, and thus neither do the containers.
I tested it out on my development backup laptop; I usually use Docker-CE on my main MBP. Podman and Buildah were able to deal with all my individual containers, but their replacement for Docker-Compose failed on all my compose environments, and the errors were not helpful. I ended up installing an unsupported version of Docker-CE, and everything worked fine.
* Podman https://podman.io/
* Buildah: https://github.com/containers/buildah
* Podman-Compose: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
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