Podman Container Tools

sandbox

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Overview

Podman is a tool used to manage OCI containers, images, volumes, and pods created from grouped containers.

Key Features

Support for multiple container image formats, including OCI and Docker images.
Full management of container lifecycle, including creation (both from an image and from an exploded root filesystem), running, checkpointing and restoring (via CRIU), and removal.
Support for pods, groups of containers that share resources and are managed together.
Support for running containers and pods without root or other elevated privileges.
No manager daemon, for improved security and lower resource utilization at idle.

Use Cases

Running containers on Linux, Mac and Windows systems using a Podman-managed virtual machine; managing container images and volumes; creating and managing pods.

Getting Started

Any recent Podman release should be able to run rootless without any additional configuration, though your operating system may require some additional configuration detailed in the [install guide](https://podman.io/getting-started/installation).

Recent Updates

v6.1.4 was released on 2026-10-12.

Did You Know?

Podman is based on libpod, a library for container lifecycle management that is also contained in this repository. The libpod library provides APIs for managing containers, pods, container images, and volumes.