> For everything else...
Except for:
- Docker Compose (because podman-compose has a large amount of open issues https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues)
- Docker Swarm (since Docker provides a lightweight orchestrator out of the box), you'd need to use something like K3s or another Kubernetes distro
- anything that uses the Docker socket (/var/run/docker.sock), so you can forget about running anything like Portainer or any of the other tools out there
In Podman in Linuxcontainers
podman-compose
Python2019–2026
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
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
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.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
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
7 sourcesIn addition to the sibling comment (which mentions that you can use the original docker-compose) such a CLI-compatible reimplementation also exists [0]. It's not always a 100% drop-in replacement, but gets you pretty far in my experience.
[0] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
In How to Replace Docker with Podman on a MacIve been using Podman for a while for my non-Kubernetes cloud deployments (i.e. small VM based things).
It's worked very well for me after a few initial hiccups a year or so ago.
Now that Podman-compose[0] is in the works, it'll really be comparable in the UX space soon, and outperforms Docker in several ways when it comes to security.
The key difference with Podman compared to Docker is that is does not run a deamon as root, like Docker does, thus all containers are created with the privilege level of the user who created it.
This can be a learning curve for those used to Docker as privileges (e.g. for filesystems, files) and capabilities (e.g. for devices, low level networking) need to be handled more explicitly as opposed to Docker's approach of "simon (root) says".
Additionally, Podman is very light weight due to the lack of a daemon
Read the rest
since there is no service or supporting software which needs to run beyond the capabilities baked into Linux.
[0] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
EDIT TO ADD: I run Linux both on desktop and server so I have no data for usage in Windows/Mac. Docker Desktop, as I understand it, is a Linux VM.
More love needs to go into docker-compose for podman. https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
In Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and podspodman has been an amazing project to follow. Since early 2020 I've been using it for rootless containers with no daemon on my Linux development environment. Development pace is picking up and I get excited every time I get a notification from GitHub about a new tagged release.
As a bonus, the podman-compose script https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/ is getting good too!
In Podman: A tool for managing OCI containers and pods> Simply use alias docker=podman and you’ll never know the difference.
Unless you use Docker Swarm, in which case you'll lose access to simple orchestration that's not overengineered, unlike Kubernetes which you'll now be forced to use.
Or unless you use software that depends on the Docker socket being available (such as for Portainer, a graphical management utility [1]), in which case you'll lose the ability to use such software.
Or maybe you're one of the countless folks who tried using Podman but ran into a variety of issues that still haven't been addressed in many cases [2].
Or maybe you use Docker Compose and now have just lost the ability to run simple single node orchestration with YAML files, because Podman Compose is oftentimes flawed as well [3].
That's not to say that what Podman is attempting to do shouldn't be applauded, yet
Read the rest
claiming that exchanging one set of leaky abstractions for another set of leaky abstractions is painless and will work for all of the people out there simply isn't true. I don't see Podman being a backwards compatible alternative to Docker on an API level, it'll simply kill it off eventually by supporting the OCI standard for containers and being a Kubernetes runtime at the lower level. Lots of people will need to re-engineer their approach to running containers and lots of time will be necessary to migrate away from Docker.
[1] https://www.portainer.io/
[2] https://github.com/containers/podman/issues
[3] https://github.com/containers/podman-compose/issues
See Podman-compose: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose
In Ignoring Docker updates is a paid feature now?