WE’RE HUGE FANS of containers. They’re a great way to run self-hosted services on your network, and over the past few years we’ve covered them extensively, from Nextcloud (cloud storage, chat and web office suite) and Immich (photo storage), to Vaultwarden (password managing) and Motion (home surveillance).
In the past, we’ve focused on Docker as the tool for running these, but there’s a new pretender on the block. What Podman lacks in finesse it makes up for by offering superior performance and security with ‘rootless’ containers—see our head to head in the December 2023 issue.
Having come out in Podman’s corner, we thought it only fair to give you a lowdown of the basics of using it on your Windows PC. In this feature, we’ll introduce you to the concept of containers, and how to set up and run self-hosted services using a mixture of the user-friendly Podman Desktop tool and command line engine.
We’ll also reveal how to deal with some of the idiosyncrasies of rootless containers, helping you get to grips with core features like autostarting containers with Windows and implementing a reverse proxy to give you access to your services from outside your home.
what a ‘container’ is. Think of it as a stripped back virtual machine—while a tool like Virtual Box emulates an entire computer’s hardware and its underlying operating system, a container contains the
