How to enter a podman container?

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1

I’ve never used docker or podman before so I’m probably missing something.
Is there any way to enter a container and see what’s inside? As I would do with toolbox.

I’m trying to use the manylinux container to build python binary wheels.

This is confusing me:

$ podman images
REPOSITORY                                      TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64               latest   6126cfa1f17b   2 weeks ago    940 MB
localhost/fedora-toolbox-fede                   30       7af4608f8548   6 weeks ago    480 MB
registry.fedoraproject.org/f30/fedora-toolbox   30       42cdab313e0f   2 months ago   480 MB

$ podman ps -a
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                     COMMAND     CREATED         STATUS                     PORTS  NAMES
367f21263192  quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64:latest  /bin/bash   9 minutes ago   Exited (0) 9 minutes ago          relaxed_williams
98d534859cc0  quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64:latest  /bin/bash   9 minutes ago   Exited (0) 9 minutes ago          relaxed_jepsen
924e0154e37f  quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64:latest  /bin/bash   20 minutes ago  Exited (0) 20 minutes ago         friendly_cannon
ba72750dd0ea  localhost/fedora-toolbox-fede:30          sleep +Inf  6 weeks ago     Created                           fedora-toolbox-fede-30

It looks like I create three identical containers from the same image (with weird names).

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2

Does these resources could be of help?

3

However this is a little example (it could not be the standard procedure, maybe one would like to build a container using a Docker file, but let’s start with simple things).

Please note: if you don’t specify a name, the container will be automatically named with such fancy names. In addition, every time you will issue podman run, without specifying a --name or without the --rm option, even using the same image, it will be created a brand new container (as you can see, you have three different manylinux containers).

Get the image

podman pull quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64:latest

Create, run and enter in a container named manytest based on such image

podman run -ti --name manytest --hostname manytest --network host manylinux2010_x86_64:latest /bin/bash

You are now inside the container. Issue exit to exit and stop the container.
Using podman ps you can check that there is not a running container named manytest.
With podman ps -a you can see that the container is here.

To start again and enter inside the container

podman start -ia manytest

To delete the container

podman rm manytest

I hope this could be helpful to take the first steps using podman.

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4

Try podman start <Container ID>; podman attach <Container ID>

or podman exec -it <Container ID> /bin/bash

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