Your issues stem from going rootless. Podman Compose creates rootless containers and that may or may not be what you want. A lot more configuration needs to be done to get rootless containers working well for persistent services that use low ports, like enabling linger for specific users or enabling low ports for non-root users.

If you want the traditional Docker experience (which is rootful) and figure out the migration towards rootless later, I’d recommend the following:

1. Install podman-docker. This provides a seamless Docker compatibility layer for podman, allowing you to even use regular docker commands that get translated behind the scenes into Podman.
2. Install regular docker-compose. This will work via podman-docker and gives you the native docker compose experience.
3. Enable podman.socket and podman-restart.service. First one socket-activates the central Podman daemon, second one restarts any podman containers with a restart-policy of always on boot.
4. Run your docker-compose commands using sudo, so sudo docker-compose up -d etc. You can run this with sudo podman compose as well if you’re allergic to hyphenation. Podman allows both rootful and rootless containers and the way you choose is by running the commands with sudo or not.

This gets you to a very Docker-like experience and is what I am currently using to host my services. I do plan on getting familiar with rootless and systemd services and Kubernetes files, but I honestly haven’t had the time to figure all that out yet.

Regarding the low port number thing, that’s just a consequence of not running as root. By default, regular users can’t listen on ports below 1000.

Podman is purposefully built to rely on systemd for running containers at startup. It ties in with the daemonless and rootless conventions. It’s also nice because systemd is already highly integrated with the rest of the OS, so doing things like making a container start up after a drive is mounted is trivial.

Podman has a command to generate systemd files for your containers, which you can then use immediately or make some minor tweaks to your liking.

I use podman for my homelab and enjoy it. I like the extra security and that it relies on standard linux systems like systemd and user permissions. It forces me to learn more about linux and things that apply to more than just podman. You can avoid a lot of trouble by running the containers as root and using network=host, but that takes away security and the fun of learning.

Writing systemd services for your containers is something yoully have to get used to with podman, pretty much. It’s actually very easy with the built in command “podman generate systemd”, so you can just do something like " podman generate systemd --name my-container > /etc/systemd/system". I much prefer managing my containers with systemd over the docker daemon. It’s nice!

Also, podman can use privileged ports as root, right?

minor issue: it’s podman-compose instead of podman compose. The hyphen feels like a step back because we moved from docker-compose to docker compose. But thT’s not a real issue.

podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

I’m also currently migrating all of my self-hosted services from docker to podman. Look into using Quadlet and systemd rather than podman-compose: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/quadlet-podman

Your Quadlet .container files will end up looking very similar to your docker compose files. Podman will automatically generate a systemd service unit for you if you drop the .container file in your user systemd unit directory ($HOME/.config/containers/systemd/) and run systemctl --user daemon-reload. Then starting the container on boot is as simple as systemctl --user enable --now containername.service.

This will not solve your rootful vs. rootless issues, as others have pointed out, but Quadlet/systemd is nice replacement for the service/container management layer instead of docker-compose/podman-compose

podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

I have not yet tried podman, but I know that podman-compose used to have an option to generate systemd units for your pods: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-generate-systemd.1.html

Still, that option has been deprecated in favour of Podman Quadlet https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html

Almost all of your problems are because you aren’t running as root. These aren’t bugs. They seem like a pain because you’re transitioning from Docker which runs as root (which is ABSOLUTELY INCORRIGIBLE in my opinion).

SELinux is a different story though. Now that’s a hard to tame beast. Things go wrong easily if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I suggest researching more before jumping off into a new technology, you seem like you weren’t anticipating some of these problems which adds to the frustration.

Podman is great, but a lot of confusion arise from the rapid development the last ~year and the fact that different distros have relatively old versions in their repos.

I recommend using the latest Fedora Server and defining your containers as quadlets. Also, on Fedora, yoi can install Cockpit (and cockpit-podman) and get a decent webgui to manage your host and container.

I should just write a blog post about this instead of typing this up on my phone in bed 😆

For the port thing, you can set the net.ipv4.ip_unprivileged_port_start sysctl to a lower value like 80 (may need to go lower if you also do email). It also applies to IPv6.

The default of 1024 is for security, but the actual security granted by it is not really that relevant nowadays. It stems from a time where ports < 1024 were used by machines to trust other machines using stuff like rsh & telnet, and before we considered man-in-the-middle attacks to be practical and relevant. Around the start of this millennium, we learned better. Nowadays we use SSH and everything is encrypted & authenticated.

The only particularly relevant risk is that if you lower it enough to also include SSH’s default port 22, some rogue process at startup might make a fake SSH server. That would come along with the scary version of the “host key changed” banner so the risk is not that high. Not very relevant if you’re following proper SSH security practices.

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it’s podman-compose instead of podman compose

Don’t use it, it’s not a full replacement. The script is barely maintained and not really “official”.

I think before switching from Docker to Podman you should first get proficient in Docker, because Podman is not for beginners (yet).

You must have been expecting philadelphia

You can make actual docker compose use podman by running a user podman docker socket and setting that as an environment variable (export DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/user/$UID/podman/podman.sock)

https://brandonrozek.com/blog/rootless-docker-compose-podman/

podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.

FWIW, I’m on Bluefin-dx (one of uBlue^[1]'s images) and I’ve noticed that my containers autostart at boot since I’ve rebased from Silverblue to Bluefin-dx. Mind you; I’m not necessarily advocating for you to make the switch to Bluefin-dx, but it’s at least worth finding out how they’ve been able to achieve that and perhaps implement their ways for your own benefit.

1. Which are mostly Fedora Atomic images with some QoL and thus SELinux, Podman (etc.) are just baked in as you would expect.

Podman isn’t a replacement for docker. Its very similar syntax wise but its not a replacement.

The only thing I use podman for is Jellyfin and distrobox