I wish I had more of an excuse to play with Podman; seems to fix all the things I didn't like about Docker. However, I'm a bit puzzled about why the "compose" function still apparently lags behind - this has been a feature request basically for as long as I've known Podman existed. Not helped by the documentation online which makes it very difficult to understand whether compose is actually enabled in the Podman tool, or a separate script, or something else.

Podman initially was daemon less, but docker-compose is a python script that interacts with dockerd directly through its rest API, not by invoking docker cli commands.

So even though podman offers a compatible cli interface, if was no help to get compose to work.

podman-compose is a re-implementation of the docker-compose spec in a podman compatible way. Like any re-implementation, compatibility issues are possible.

The main podman project instead chose to tackle such incompatibility by implementing an optional daemon mode offering a compatible to docker REST api.

If you start de podman service on a recent version, you can use docker-compose as-is. It will happily send commands to the podman daemon and from my few initial tests, everything works perfectly so far.

Last time I checked docker-compose with podman didn't allow the creation of networks. Has that changed in the meantime?

The docker-compose program can work with podman out of the box for normal containers (i think) and with rootless containers if you have give it the correct socket. I have DOCKER_HOST set to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock and i can use docker-compose.yml files.

podman-compose is indeed a separate script. I had some bugs with that, but it might be fixed now.

I can't speak for it working for anything beyond basic stuff, because I haven't yet used it for anything complex.

Podman implemented Dockers REST API as part of either the Podman 3 or 4 release (whichever one is in Debian stable), and I’ve been able to use docker-compose with it since then.

Podman has fairly good support for k8s deployment configurations, which I’ve used as well, if you’re a k8s shop, but I understand there are a lot of places that have standardized on compose for development.

Same story here. Had my eyes on it for what seems like forever now, but without proper compose support I can’t justify jumping ship.

What does Podman provide over Docker other than theoretical security boost being daemon-less?