Podman & Ubuntu
2026-08-16
I've always liked the idea of rootless containerization. I think it's even more crucial now that we have agents running all the time on our machines.
I learned about Podman before the LLM era from Podman in Action, which I found useful. One of the most annoying things about Podman, though, is using it on Ubuntu. The version available through apt is outdated, so you have to build it from source if you want a newer release.
Well, now that we have AI, I decided to take a stab at it and see if I could get it to build easily so I could use it on my servers or as a sandbox for my agents.
Credit goes to podman-static for open-sourcing his repo. My agent definitely took a lot of things from it.
I pushed it to my dotfiles. Here is how to build and install it:
git clone https://github.com/JafarAbdi/myconfigs.git --depth 1
cd ./myconfigs/podman
just build
just install
And ta-da! You now have a fully static Podman build that you can copy to any machine, and it will work out of the box.
I need to write a blog post about how much I love musl and zigbuild and how much easier they make my life by making fully static binaries possible.