podman
also: Pod Manager, podman-compose
Podman is a container engine that runs containers without requiring a daemon process, making it a daemonless alternative to Docker for building, running, and managing Linux containers.
Podman (Pod Manager) is a tool for managing containers and pods—groups of containers that share network namespaces. Unlike Docker, podman runs containerized applications directly as child processes of the podman command, eliminating the need for a central daemon running as root.
This daemonless architecture provides several advantages: better security (no privileged daemon needed), simpler rootless operation (run containers as non-root users), and tighter integration with systemd. Podman is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Docker, supporting nearly identical commands.
Example: podman run -d --name webserver -p 8080:80 nginx launches an Nginx container in daemonless mode. You can also use podman pod create to group multiple containers together.
Podman is part of the libpod project and is the standard container engine in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and other distributions seeking a more secure, decentralized containerization approach.