podman

Overview

The podman driver is an alternative container runtime to the Docker driver.

Requirements

• Install podman

  Experimental

This is an experimental driver. Please use it only for experimental reasons until it has reached maturity. For a more reliable minikube experience, use a non-experimental driver, like Docker.

Usage

It’s recommended to run minikube with the podman driver and CRI-O container runtime (except when using Rootless Podman):

minikube start --driver=podman --container-runtime=cri-o

Alternatively, start minikube with the podman driver only:

minikube start --driver=podman

To make podman the default driver:

minikube config set driver podman

Rootless Podman

By default, minikube executes Podman with sudo. To use Podman without sudo (i.e., Rootless Podman), set the rootless property to true:

minikube config set rootless true

Alternatively, pass the --rootless flag when starting minikube:

minikube start --driver=podman --rootless

Host prerequisites

When running the podman driver in rootless mode, minikube runs as your non-root user. The host must configure subordinate UID and GID ranges in /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid for that user. Without them, rootless Podman fails to allocate user namespaces and minikube start fails.

Tested configuration on Ubuntu 24.04:

sudo usermod --add-subuids 100000-165535 --add-subgids 100000-165535 $USER
podman system migrate

After configuring subordinate IDs, log out and log back in (or restart your session) for the changes to take effect.

Note: This configuration was verified on Ubuntu 24.04; please validate and report results for other distributions (Fedora, Debian, etc.). See the upstream Podman rootless tutorial for details on /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid configuration.

For Rootless Podman, it is recommended to set --container-runtime to containerd:

minikube start --driver=podman --container-runtime=containerd

See the Rootless Docker section for additional requirements and restrictions.

Known Issues

• On Linux, Podman requires passwordless running of sudo. If you run into an error about sudo, do the following:

$ sudo visudo

Then append the following to the section at the very bottom of the file where username is your user account.

username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/podman

Be sure this text is after #includedir /etc/sudoers.d. To confirm it worked, try:

sudo -k -n podman version

• On all other operating systems, make sure to create and start the virtual machine that is needed for Podman.

podman machine init --cpus 2 --memory 2048 --disk-size 20
podman machine start
podman system connection default podman-machine-default-root
podman info

Also see co/podman-driver open issues.

Troubleshooting

• Run minikube start --alsologtostderr -v=7 to debug errors and crashes