libpod - library for running OCI-based containers in Pods

Status: Active Development

What is the scope of this project?

libpod provides a library for applications looking to use the Container Pod concept popularized by Kubernetes. libpod also contains a tool podman, which allows you to manage Pods, Containers, and Container Images.

At a high level, we expect the scope of libpod/podman to be the following:

• Support multiple image formats including the existing Docker/OCI image formats.
• Support for multiple means to download images including trust & image verification.
• Container image management (managing image layers, overlay filesystems, etc).
• Container and POD process lifecycle management.
• Resource isolation of containers and PODS.

What is not in scope for this project?

• Building container images. See Buildah.
• Signing and pushing images to various image storages. See Skopeo.
• Container Runtimes daemons for working with Kubernetes CRIs See CRI-O.

OCI Projects Plans

The plan is to use OCI projects and best of breed libraries for different aspects:

• Runtime: runc (or any OCI runtime-spec implementation) and oci runtime tools
• Images: Image management using containers/image
• Storage: Storage and management of image layers using containers/storage
• Networking: Networking support through use of CNI
• Conmon: conmon Conmon is a tool for monitoring OCI runtimes. Part of the CRI-O package

Podman Information for Developers

Installation notes Information on how to install Podman in your environment.

OCI Hooks Support Information on how Podman configures OCI Hooks to run when launching a container.

Podman Commands A list of the Podman commands with links to their man pages and in many cases videos showing the commands in use.

Podman Usage Transfer Useful information for ops and dev transfer as it relates to infrastructure that utilizes Podman. This page includes tables showing Docker commands and their Podman equivalent commands.

Tutorials Tutorials on the Podman utility.

Communication with Fellow Developers

For async communication and long running discussions please use issues and pull requests on the github repo. This will be the best place to discuss design and implementation.

For sync communication we have an IRC channel #PODMAN, on chat.freenode.net, that everyone is welcome to join and chat about development.

Current Roadmap

1. Basic pod/container lifecycle, basic image pull (done)
2. Support for tty handling and state management (done)
3. Basic integration with kubelet once client side changes are ready (done)
4. Support for log management, networking integration using CNI, pluggable image/storage management (done)
5. Support for exec/attach (done)