I don't understand how podman can be used for serious development work. Sure, if you want to be bound to one single platform (linux), and create a bunch of individual files, you can sort of get something a little bit like compose.

But the beauty of compose is the same as the beauty of the Dockerfile. Portability, reproducibility (mostly), and a single readable file with all the relevant parts. It means a developer can use the same compose file locally that's used for deployment.

How do people actually work with podman? Do you work with a team? How do you setup a local development stack the way you would with compose?

Podman can run compose - either its own, or docker-compose if you tell Podman to listen on the docker socket.

I use Podman on both macos and Windows, with compose files, so I'm a bit perplexed by this whole comment.

We have a consistent wsl image for everyone. So they are all on Linux. Then we have a podman pod defined in a bash script. We have a Justfile where you can run ‘just services’ and it all “just works (tm)”.

Once the pod is defined you can use ‘podman pod up/down’ to interact with it, but mostly we encourage people to use the Just recipes to do the things.

The thing is, podman has docker-compose like management built in, in the form of pods, but it doesn’t seem to be very well socialized.

On the server we use quartet+systemd and it’s great. Never had an issue with that part.

I run podman for local dev containers or for isolated sandboxes mostly. Anything needing orchestration and I go straight to k8s, never liked docker compose.