[Feature]: Add native Podman support, maybe let us choose if we want to use Docker or Podman via an env during installation

[peaklabs-dev]

Description

Let us choose between docker and podman. Best case would be if we could set a custom environment variable to choose podman or docker during installation.

Minimal Reproduction (if possible, example repository)

The advantage of Podman would be better security and rootless architecture by default.
-> would help with: #2387

• Add a Podman environment variable that can be used during installation via the install.sh script and via a docker compose file installation.
• Add Podman as a drop-in replacement for Docker (or in addition).

Exception or Error

No response

Version

[mpcref]

In "Podman mode" Coolify could make use of Quadlet which comes with Podman to run pods as systemd services.

[harish2704]

Hello team,
I Just want to inform you that it is possible to run Coolify with Podman. The details are given below.

During the experiment, I found 3 things in Coolify which is not compatible with with a typical Podman setup. They are

1. Coolify has hard dependency on Docker-cli and Docker-compose plugin
   • it is not fully compatible with podman-docker or podman-compose.
   • So I installed docker-cli from the docker repo without installing Docker service.
   • This way, docker-cli was communicating to podman over podman.sock
   • I created a unprivileged user ( say userid=1001 ) and started podman service under that user and created symlink for docker.sock
   • ln -s /var/run/user/1001/podman/podman.sock /var/run/docker.sock
2. Coolify is expecting a Server with Root access to run containers .
   • For that, I created a simple systemd based container with sshd enabled on same machine ( as unprivileged user )
   • Bind mounted /var/run/user/1001/podman/podman.sock ( ie, /var/run/docker.sock ) to that machine
   • Installed docker-cli on that machine .
   • This way, docker in that VM is actually communicating to podman running as unprivileged user in the host machine
   • I skipped onboarding after startup and manually configured the Server with IP of VM and by setting up ssh key.
3. While adding a new server, Coolify was checking the version number of docker . This is not compatible with Podman.
   • I think this behavior of Coolify should be fixed and Instead of checking Server.version Coolify should check Server.ApiVersion for compatibility
   • I fixed this issue by manually patching ( editing ) the php source code inside the container

After that, everything was working as expected. I tried deploying couple of applications and it worked.

In short, No.3 was the only bug like incompatibility I found during this setup.

Edit: details of host machine I tried these things

NAME="AlmaLinux"
VERSION="9.3 (Shamrock Pampas Cat)"
ARCH: aarch64

[harish2704]

@peaklabs-dev : Can I raise a PR to fix the issue mentioned in No.3 ?
I mean, i Coolify team agrees that this behavior should be fixed, then I am ready to raise a PR which fixes above mentioned area.

[harish2704]

Just sharing one more info

1. Traefik proxy may not work well with Podman due incompatibility in the way health_status event is emitted by Podman.
2. Podman will emit health_status for each health check attempt and each of those attempts will cause Traefik proxy to re-fetch and reload its configuration from docker/podman API.
3. In a server with multiple deployed applications, it is a huge waste of CPU resource .

I opened a bug report in podman repo containers/podman#24003

[peaklabs-dev]

@harish2704 Thank you for your work. Of course raise a PR and we will check it. We have official plans for podman later down the line once stabel is out but if you are abele to contribute to this now we are always open for contributors.