Discussion on: Using podman instead of docker on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL 2)

[Colin Griffin]

Thanks for this! Is there a way to get this rolling to create the /var/run/podman/podman.sock? docker-compose appears to not like the lack of socket on WSL, since it relies on $DOCKER_HOST

[Jonathan Bowman]

I am sure that would be possible. It would be similar to getting a doctor socket working in WSL.

Curious though. If you are open to a socket, would you be open to simply using docker?

[Colin Griffin]

I was hoping to go podman-first, or using docker with the shared socket per one of the other posts. One problem is that I could not get windows and wsl to play beautifully with docker desktop on windows but podman on wsl. I'm trying to orchestrate the transition from docker-compose to podman or kompose, and there are small environmental gaps that are blocking. But we're almost there!

[Thiago Linhares]

If anyone still needs this, I've managed to do, by adjusting my ".bashrc" or ".zshrc" like this:

# Define runtime dir for podman socket
if [[ -z "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" ]]; then
  export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$UID
  if [[ ! -d "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" ]]; then
    export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/$USER-runtime
    if [[ ! -d "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" ]]; then
      mkdir -m 0700 "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"
    fi
  fi
fi
# Check if podman service is running (rootless), and start if not.
if ! pgrep -f -x 'podman system service -t 0' > /dev/null;then
        podman system service -t 0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &
fi

# Define DOCKER_HOST to podman socket, so docker-compose can work with it
# I've installed docker-compose using: pip3 install docker-compose from my user (non-root)
DOCKER_HOST=`echo "unix://${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/podman/podman.sock"`
export DOCKER_HOST