podman-desktop

podman runs on linux, so this script spins up a virtual linux machine, and configures podman to use it as a remote host.

Requires muiltipass and podman

brew install multipass podman

Setup a vm for podman. Values shown here are defaults. Mounts are the same as Docker Desktop.

podman-desktop \
  --name podman \
  --identity ~/.ssh/podman \
  20.04

If you'd like to pass any other params to multipass launch, just put them after --

podman-desktop -- --cpus 3  --mem 3G --network <spec>

By default, podman-desktop will mount the same folders as Docker Desktop.

If you'd like to change the default mounts, set the MOUNTS variable to an array

If you'd like to mount nothing, (for example, due to sshfs_server cpu usage) set MOUNTS to an empty string.

Image building with buildkit

Podman builds are considerably slower compared to Docker builds. One way to mitigate this is to use buildkit. Multipass instances provisioned with podman-desktop already contain a ready-to-go buildkit daemon. All you need to do is use the buildkit-cli from your host system:

buildctl \
	--addr=tcp://$(shell multipass info podman --format json | jq -r ".info.podman.ipv4[]"):1234 \
	build \
	--frontend dockerfile.v0 \
	--local context=. \
	--local dockerfile=. \
	--output type=oci,name="thisgetsignored:imagename" \                                                                                               
	| podman load

Please note, the resulting image will be localhost/imagename:latest, because Buildkit does not seem write OCI compliant image annotations.

Thank you

Thank you to @heussd for adding buildkit support