First and foremost, the remote-client is under heavy development. We are adding new commands and functions frequently. We also are working on a rootless implementation that does not require privileged users.
The purpose of the Podman remote-client is to allow users to interact with a Podman "backend" while on a separate client. The command line interface of the remote client is exactly the same as the regular Podman commands with the exception of some flags being removed as they do not apply to the remote-client.
To use the remote-client, you will need a binary for your client and a Podman "backend"; hereafter referred to as the Podman node. In this context, a Podman node is a Linux system with Podman installed on it and the varlink service activated. You will also need to be able to ssh into this system as a user with privileges to the varlink socket (more on this later).
At this time, the remote-client is not being packaged for any distribution. It must be built from source. To set up your build environment, see Installation notes and follow the section Building from scratch. Once you can successfully build the regular Podman binary, you can now build the remote-client.
$ make podman-remote
Like building the regular Podman, the resulting binary will be in the bin directory. This is the binary you will run on the remote node later in the instructions.
To use the remote-client, you must perform some setup on both the remote and Podman nodes. In this case, the remote node refers to where the remote-client is being run; and the Podman node refers to where Podman and its storage reside.
The Podman node must have Podman (not the remote-client) installed as normal. If your system uses systemd, then simply start the Podman varlink socket.
$ sudo systemctl start io.podman.socket
If your system cannot use systemd, then you can manually establish the varlink socket with the Podman command:
$ sudo podman --log-level debug varlink --timeout 0 unix://run/podman/io.podman
For now, the remote-client requires that you be able to run a privileged Podman and have privileged ssh access to the remote system. This limitation is being worked on.
To use the remote client, we must establish an ssh connection to the Podman server. We will also use that session to bind the remote varlink socket locally.
$ ssh -L 127.0.0.1:1234:/run/podman/io.podman root@remotehost
Note here we are binding the Podman socket to a local TCP socket on port 1234.
With the ssh session established, we can now run the remote client in a different terminal window. You must inform Podman where to look for the bound socket you created in the previous step using an environment variable.
$ PODMAN_VARLINK_ADDRESS="tcp:127.0.0.1:1234" bin/podman-remote images
REPOSITORY TAG IMAGE ID CREATED SIZE
docker.io/library/ubuntu latest 47b19964fb50 2 weeks ago 90.7 MB
docker.io/library/alpine latest caf27325b298 3 weeks ago 5.8 MB
quay.io/cevich/gcloud_centos latest 641dad61989a 5 weeks ago 489 MB
k8s.gcr.io/pause 3.1 da86e6ba6ca1 14 months ago 747 kB