Podman Compose is a tool for easily testing and running multi-container applications. Microcks offers a simple way to set up the minimal required containers to have a functional environment on your local computer. This procedure has been successfully tested with Podman 2.1.1 onto Fedora 33+ and should be OK on CentOS Stream 8+ and RHEL 8+ distributions too.

Usage

To get started, make sure you first have the Podman and the Podman Compose packages installed on your system.

Then, in your terminal issue the following commands:

1. Clone this repository.

   git clone https://github.com/microcks/microcks.git
   

2. Change to the install folder

   cd microcks/install/podman-compose
   

3. Spin up the containers in rootless mode using our utility script:

   $ ./run-microcks.sh
   Running rootless containers...
   Discovered host IP address: 192.168.3.102
   
   Starting Microcks using podman-compose ...
   ------------------------------------------
   Stop it with:  podman-compose -f microcks.yml --transform_policy=identity stop
   Re-launch it with:  podman-compose -f microcks.yml --transform_policy=identity start
   Clean everything with:  podman-compose -f microcks.yml --transform_policy=identity down
   ------------------------------------------
   Go to https://localhost:8080 - first login with admin/123
   Having issues? Check you have changed microcks.yml to your platform
   
   using podman version: podman version 2.1.1
   podman run [...]
   

This will start the required containers and setup a simple environment for your usage.

Open a new browser tab and point to the http://localhost:8080 endpoint. This will redirect you to the Keycloak Single Sign On page for login. Use the following default credentials to login into the application:

• Username: admin
• Password: 123

You will be redirected to the main dashboard page. You can now start using Microcks.

Rootless or rootfull?

While the rootless mode looks very appealing it does not come as a free lunch.

In particular, in the rootless mode:

• containers have no IP address and no DNS aliases
• port redirection is done in userspace (rootfull mode uses iptables which is faster)
• the overlay storage is done in userspace with fuse (which is slower than the traditional overlayfs mount)

So, unless you need high performances or a specific network setup, you can use the rootless mode.

For the Podman support in Microcks, we aim to support both rootless and rootfull mode.

If you’d like to give a try to the rootfull mode, you’ll have to enable the dnsalias plugin in the default podman network:

sudo podman network rm podman
sudo podman network create --subnet 10.88.0.0/16 podman

Once done you just need to run the same run-microcks.sh script with sudo.