9 Podman as a service
This chapter covers
- Running podman as a service
- Podman service support for two REST APIs
- Python libraries podman-py and docker-py used to manage Podman containers
- Support for docker-compose
- Remote command line communication with the Podman service
- Managing SSH communications with remote Podman instances
In previous chapters, you learned about the Podman command line. The problem with this is sometimes you want to work with containers from a remote system. Similarly you might want to write code in a scripting language to interact with containers. Docker, being written as a client server application, supports a popular remote API, which led to the creation of libraries written in Python and Javascript to access the daemon. Docker-py is a popular Python library used to interact with the Docker daemon.
Many CI/CD, GUIs, and remote management systems have been built to manage Docker containers. Code editors like Visual Studio have even built in plugins that talk directly to the Docker API. Advanced tools like docker-compose led to a new programming language that is used to orchestrate multiple containers on a host by interacting with the Docker daemon.