[Feature]: Installation using Podman

[harishpillay]

Feature Description

Writing a bash script to install, check, diagnose and uninstall Open Notebook with Podman on Fedora Linux systems.

Why would this be helpful?

I spent some time experimenting how I can get this working with Podman on my servers that run Fedora Linux 43.

I did quite a bit of tweaking and with the help of Claude.AI, I was able to polish the installation to take care of SELinux, and access to the instance behind a Nginx Proxy Manager (although that is giving me some issues to be resolved).

The script defaults to a CPU only setup. It has a diagnostics option and that was all developed with Claude.ai. I wanted to add some diagnostics, but was trying to find the best way to do it and claude.ai was very helpful.

There is a Nginx proxy settings in the script that you can ignore if you are not using it.

Proposed Solution (Optional)

This would be implemented via a bash script. I'm attaching version 1 of the script called "open-notebook-podman-all-in-one.sh"

Additional Context

To use this script here are some constraints:
a) The script was developed, tested and run on Fedora Linux 43
b) It uses bash
c) It will install podman and related tooling (podman-compose etc).
d) It will create the needed containers (one for open-notebook, one for surrealdb and ollama.
e) It will turn on ports 5505/tcp and 8502/tcp
f) It will ask you if you want to download an LLM at the start, but can be skipped if you want to do so later.
g) You can uninstall the whole setup and leave behind a clean system

open-notebook-podman-all-in-one.sh

What'd be good to have:
a) to be able to export the whole setup to run the containers + data elsewhere
b) to have multi-user access to the notebook.
c) add a systemd service

Contribution

• I am a developer and would like to work on implementing this feature (pending maintainer approval)

[lfnovo]

Thanks for putting this together! A Podman installation script for Fedora is a useful community contribution. Keeping this in the backlog for now — we'll revisit when we have bandwidth to review and potentially incorporate into our docs.

[harishpillay]

Thanks. I will keep updating the script as the open-notebook progresses as well.

[lfnovo]

Marking as needs-design. Thanks @harishpillay — the working script is a great starting point. Before incorporating, we need to settle a few things:

• Where it lives / how it's maintained: an official docs section (Podman/Fedora guide), a community-maintained external link, or a script versioned in the repo (which carries ongoing maintenance cost as the project evolves). This drives how much we own it.
• Generalization: the current script is specific to Fedora 43 and opinionated (Nginx Proxy Manager, CPU-only). For anything "official" we'd want it to generalize across distros / setups, or be clearly scoped as a Fedora recipe.
• Open extras the author noted: portable export of the setup, a systemd service, and multi-user access (the last one belongs to the multi-user umbrella [Umbrella] Multi-user System Support #712, not here).

Possibly related: #623 (Ollama link-local addressing when mixing Podman and host). Once we decide the home + scope, this can move to ready.

[lfnovo]

Status (Sep 5, 2026): exploring — moved from Issues to Ideas.

@harishpillay, this was converted from issue #451 under the Open Contribution model: Issues are reserved for work with a committed owner and scope; Ideas is where we shape things before that. Nothing about the value of your script changed. What changed is that we now say out loud what we will and won't own.

Breaking your proposal into its distinct parts, checked against the repo today:

1. Podman as a supported install path. There is no Podman page in docs/1-INSTALLATION/. The only Podman-specific bits are FRONTEND_BIND_HOST (from [Bug]: HOSTNAME Environment Variable is ignored in Podman - DNS Resolution is used instead #994) and the host.containers.internal hint in the external-Ollama quick start. A docs page covering rootless Podman, SELinux :Z volume labels, host.containers.internal and FRONTEND_BIND_HOST is small, useful and something we'd accept as an Issue.
2. The install script itself. We don't want to version a distro-specific bash installer in the repo; it rots with every release and we can't test Fedora in CI. The proposal is: you host it in your own repo, we link it from the Podman docs page as a community recipe.
3. Link-local blocker ([Bug]: Ollama link-local address not allowed (when mixing Podman and host) #623). On rootless Podman, host.containers.internal resolves to 169.254.x.x, which our URL validation rejects while our docs tell Linux users to use exactly that host. That is a real bug in the Issues queue and a prerequisite for the docs page to work as written.
4. systemd unit and portable export. Reasonable, but out of scope for the docs page. Could be part of your recipe.
5. Multi-user. Belongs to Multi-user support — what should it mean for Open Notebook? #1254 (the multi-user discussion), not here.

Question for you: would you host the script and keep it current, with us linking to it from an official Podman page? If yes, item 1 graduates to a ready Issue and the docs page credits your work as the reference setup.