UPDATE: podman desktop
is now a thing!
I had been having some issues with the docker-desktop service on Windows, where it wouldn’t autostart properly and would start into a broken state where nothing worked. These problems, together with the license change of the docker-desktop product and recommendations to give podman a try, led me to try podman instead.
About podman
podman is a container runtime like docker but designed with a different philosophy. The podman model doesn’t have a main daemon that always needs to run, nor does it require running the containers with root.
podman-compose is just docker-compose but for podman.
The solution
I found that WSL2 with podman and podman-compose should be a drop-in replacement for docker-desktop, for my use-cases.
All the was needed besides that was some simple Windows “bindings” using .bat files
I don’t like manual installation processes, so I’ve created a script to install everything, to replace docker-desktop for my use-cases at home and at work. This meant using WSL2, as rootless podman isn’t supported at all on WSL1.
The script is written in powershell and comes with a .bat file to easily run the powershell script with admin privileges, which is required for enabling Windows features and such.
The script can be found here on GitHub . The README describes known problems and their workarounds.
After running the script to end, you should be able to use podman and podman-compose (and docker and docker-compose through aliases) to run containers on your Windows machine, right from your cmd or powershell terminal.