Enhancement Request: Add podman as a provider

[simao-silva]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Following the discussion in #12378, is podman supported or going to be supported as a provider?

Describe the solution you'd like Support of Podman as a provider

[hussam-qasem]

I look forward to having podman as a provider as well. Thank you!

[jerrykan]

It seems that the docker provider is just invoking docker commands in the background and not using the Docker daemon. Fortunately podman is a drop-in replacement for docker so a work-around is just to create a symbolic link for docker the points to the podman binary. An example of doing this on a Debian box would be:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/podman /usr/local/bin/docker

However it would be nice if Vagrant was able to provide a podman provider that was an alias for the docker provider that just invoked the podman binary instead of the docker binary.

[hussam-qasem]

Fortunately podman is a drop-in replacement for docker so a work-around is just to create a symbolic link for docker the points to the podman binary. An example of doing this on a Debian box would be:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/podman /usr/local/bin/docker

Depending on your distribution, you can install podman-docker instead:

$ dnf info podman-docker

Available Packages
Name         : podman-docker
...
Summary      : Emulate Docker CLI using podman
Description  : This package installs a script named docker that emulates the Docker CLI by
             : executes podman commands, it also creates links between all Docker CLI man
             : pages and podman.

[Stromweld]

I think this is a good feature request and wouldn't be too hard to add to the docker provider as an alias for podman, then variablize the docker commands with variable set based on provider.

[jerrykan]

After doing some more experimentation using Podman with Vagrant it seems there are incompatibilities with the networking side of things. When I try to use:

docker.vm.network :private_network, ip: "172.20.128.2"

I get the following error:

ERROR warden: Error occurred: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass

          config = network["IPAM"]["Config"]
                                  ^^^^^^^^^^

This seems to be because the output of docker network inspect is different than podman network inspect:

$ docker network inspect vagrant_network_172.20.128.0/24
[
    {
        "Name": "vagrant_network_172.20.128.0/24",
        "Id": "9f8e7e5fd1358cd217a64af1b915056067910c7558a019241b79f609f4596522",
        "Created": "2023-06-13T14:12:38.36957161Z",
        "Scope": "local",
        "Driver": "bridge",
        "EnableIPv6": false,
        "IPAM": {
            "Driver": "default",
            "Options": {},
            "Config": [
                {
                    "Subnet": "172.20.128.0/24"
                }
            ]
        },
        "Internal": false,
        "Attachable": false,
        "Ingress": false,
        "ConfigFrom": {
            "Network": ""
        },
        "ConfigOnly": false,
        "Containers": {},
        "Options": {},
        "Labels": {}
    }
]

$ podman network inspect vagrant_network_172.20.128.0
[
     {
          "name": "vagrant_network_172.20.128.0",
          "id": "983ad7ff49e95a0b63c3262cb17be629cb60bb0ee69051e778fade038a70432e",
          "driver": "bridge",
          "network_interface": "podman1",
          "created": "2023-06-14T00:26:55.634945462+10:00",
          "subnets": [
               {
                    "subnet": "172.20.128.0/24",
                    "gateway": "172.20.128.1"
               }
          ],
          "ipv6_enabled": false,
          "internal": false,
          "dns_enabled": true,
          "ipam_options": {
               "driver": "host-local"
          }
     }
]

Note that Vagrant also creates networks with a / in the name which Podman doesn't support.

Looks like there might need to be a few more alterations made to the docker provider than just changing the binary that is invoked.