DOCKER VS PODMAN

When Cockpit was first developed, it had plug-in support for administering your Docker containers remotely via its user-friendly web interface.

But then Red Hat OS became a major backer of Cockpit, and when Red Hat developed its own alternative to Docker—Podman— the developers were quick to drop official support for Docker in favor of Podman.

Podman and Docker both support the same container types, and Podman uses the same command structure as Docker—indeed, Red

Hat recommends the “alias docker=podman” command to minimize disruption when switching from Docker to Podman. Podman has two key advantages: each container runs within its own self-contained process; and it supports “rootless” containers, namely containers that can be run using non-root user accounts for greater security.

Given this, you’d expect us to embrace Podman fully in this tutorial. And that’s what we intended to do. But Podman is still relatively young, and major releases keep breaking functionality, particularly on lesser supported distros like Ubuntu. At the time of writing, Podman’s rootless support is hit and miss in Ubuntu—and that’s being generous.

Thankfully, while Cockpit’s developers have dropped support for Docker, you can still install the plug-in manually. So that’s what we’ve decided to do for this feature: we’re going to stick with Docker, and give Podman time to develop further and iron out its teething problems. And don’t worry about missing out on Podman’s rootless support —you can configure Docker containers to run using a specific user account with just two environment variables (see https://docs.linuxserver.io/ for more details).