DEV Community

Cover image for Managing Local and Remote Podman instances over LazyDocker
Alfonso Sanchez
Alfonso Sanchez

Posted on

Managing Local and Remote Podman instances over LazyDocker

#podman #containers #docker #devops

If you're like me, you love the power of Podman for rootless containers and the efficiency of Lazydocker's TUI. But getting them to play nicely, especially across a local machine and remote servers could be difficult, especially when handling SSH commands and socket forwarding for configuring Lazydocker to manage multiple Podman instances.

This guide will help you with that process by introducing ezpodman, a wrapper script designed to automate and simplify this entire workflow.

The Official guthub repo for this could is alfonsosanchez12/ezpodman

If you are also interested in knowing how to manage this process manually, you can read it here -> alfonsosanchez12/podman_on_lazydocker_The-Hard-Way

Setting the Stage: Essential Prerequisites

Before we get our hands dirty with configs, let's do a quick tool check. The table below outlines the required tooling.

Tooling requirements

Required Tooling:

Tool Purpose
docker Optional: for other tooling
podman Local container engine
podman-remote Connect to remote Podman (Included with Podman 4+)
lazydocker Docker/Podman TUI
jq Parses podman-remote JSON (needed for ezpodman)

Optional (but strongly recommended):

Tool Purpose
fzf Fuzzy remote picker

Environment requirements

Remote podman instance management

If your goal is to manage a remote Podman instance with Lazydocker, make sure you have (aside a podman instance) enabled lingering and a podman-socket

loginctl enable-linger $USER
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 
systemctl --user enable --now podman.socket
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

To verify that the socket is active and listening, you can run a curl command directly against the Unix socket:

curl --unix-socket $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock http://d/v3.0.0/libpod/_ping
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

A successful response (typically OK) confirms the remote side is ready.

local Podman instance management

If your goal is to manage a local Podman instance with Lazydocker, verify you have:

For a local linux-machine a podman-socket enabled

$ systemctl --user list-sockets podman.socket
LISTEN                            UNIT          ACTIVATES
/run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock podman.socket podman.service
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

For a local linux-machine a podman-machine initiated

$ podman system connection list
Name                         URI                                                           Identity                                                     Default     ReadWrite
podman-machine-default       ssh://core@127.0.0.1:50637/run/user/501/podman/podman.sock    /Users/<USER>/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/machine  true        true
podman-machine-default-root  ssh://root@127.0.0.1:50637/run/podman/podman.sock             /Users/<USER>/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/machine  false       true
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

2. Use ezpodman for Simplified Management

ezpodman is a Bash wrapper specifically designed to eliminate the difficulty of managing lazydocker connections for both local and remote Podman instances. It automates the work of tunnel creation and environment configuration.

ezpodman feature set:

  • Interactive menu for easily selecting and managing your local and remote connections.
  • Built-in setup wizard to automates the remote setup process, including SSH key generation, copying keys to the remote host, and podman-remote configuration.
  • Automatic and persistent SSH tunnel management.

3. Getting ezpodman Up and Running

Installation is a straightforward process. Because the tool is a self-contained script, setup is quick, easy, and requires no complex dependencies or daemons.

Installation

Recommended Installation This installs the script to your user's local binary directory and doesn't require sudo privileges.

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alfonsosanchez12/ezpodman/main/ezpodman -o ~/.local/bin/ezpodman
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/ezpodman
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You can now test it with a local podman instance by executing it

ezpodman
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

For the complete set of options you can run ezpodman -h

For in-depth information you can check the github repo notes

The Automated Setup Wizard

The ezpodman setup wizard helps you handling the podman socket management steps for you, from key generation to final connection configuration. This wizard is mainly useful for handling remote connections.

To launch the wizard, simply run:

ezpodman --setup
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

The script will guide you through the following steps:

  • Naming the connection for easy future reference (e.g., prod-server).
  • Specifying the remote destination in the format user@host.
  • Generating a new ed25519 SSH key if you choose to, saving it for the connection.
  • Copying the new public key to the remote host using the standard ssh-copy-id utility.
  • Adding the fully configured connection to podman-remote for immediate use.

4. A Practical Guide to Using ezpodman

Managing the Local Podman Instances

The simplest use case is managing your local podman containers. Running ezpodman with no arguments defaults to local mode.
On Linux, it connects directly to the local rootless Podman socket.
On macOS, it automatically detects and creates a tunnel to the default podman-machine, treating it as the local instance.

ezpodman
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Connecting to Remote Instances

  1. Use the interactive picker to select from your list of configured remotes. Having fzf installed makes this option more enjoyable. 
ezpodman -r
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  1. Connect directly to a specific, named remote instance: If you know the name on the podman connection, you can specify directly the name as follows 
ezpodman -r <connection-name>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Advanced Tunnel Control

ezpodman can also manage SSH tunnels independently. This makes it useful for any other Docker-compatible tools you might use, such as custom scripts.

ezpodman -m
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • Open a tunnel only and print the DOCKER_HOST variable for use in your current shell
  • List all active tunnels managed by ezpodman
  • Stop a specific tunnel by its connection name
  • Restart a specific tunnel
  • Kill all ezpodman tunnels at once
  • Remove a connection configuration entirely

I hope you found useful this information, as well as the ezpodman tool for your day-to-day podman container management.

Cover image of Lazydocker running over a Podman socket. Podman logo by podman

Top comments (0)