Static podman

[jwendell]

Is it possible to build a static version of podman?

The use case would be to easily use podman in a machine with cri-o, in order to see/interact/debug running containers and inspect images in the cri-o host. Then one could just copy the podman binary into the host.

My particular use case: I'm trying to inspect containers in a minikube VM (started with --container-runtime=cri-o). Is there a better way to do that?

/kind feature

[mheon]

You might want to investigate crictl for debugging CRI-O in that scenario. You might run into similar problems with static binaries though. As for building Podman statically, I don't think anyone has ever looked into that. It sounds like it should be possible, though.

…

On Sun, Sep 2, 2018, 15:52 Jonh Wendell ***@***.***> wrote: Is it possible to build a static version of podman? The use case would be to easily use podman in a machine with cri-o, in order to see/interact/debug running containers and inspect images in the cri-o host. Then one could just copy the podman binary into the host. My particular use case: I'm trying to inspect containers in a minikube VM (started with --container-runtime=cri-o). Is there a better way to do that? /kind feature — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1399>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AHYHCOJpnaYFTVX3pkIiT7Vim_PpW5Gqks5uXDbvgaJpZM4WWveR> .

[rhatdan]

We have a PR To make buildah staticly linked. Which I need to get back to.
If you have CRI-O on a system you might be able to just take podman executable (as long as it was built for the same OS and run it, without requiring it to be static. Problems might happen because of conflicting versions of conmon though.

Which arch are you running with CRI-O?

[jwendell]

Yeah, I tried copying podman (from fedora 28) and run it, but it failed. That's why I asked for a static version. crictl (which is statically linked) worked fine.
I'm running minikube:

$ uname -a
Linux crio 4.15.0 #1 SMP Mon Jul 16 20:23:29 UTC 2018 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/os-release 
NAME=Buildroot
VERSION=2018.05
ID=buildroot
VERSION_ID=2018.05
PRETTY_NAME="Buildroot 2018.05"

$ ./podman
./podman: error while loading shared libraries: libselinux.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

# /home/docker/crictl -r unix:///var/run/crio/crio.sock version
Version:  0.1.0
RuntimeName:  cri-o
RuntimeVersion:  1.10.0
RuntimeApiVersion:  v1alpha1

[mheon]

@rhatdan brings up another point - we rely on specific conmon commits for Podman, which often differ from CRI-O, causing us to ship our own version. You can't just copy the static Podman over as such - you'd need to provide conmon as well.

[rhatdan]

Does you system not have a libselinux.so.1 package? What OS are you doing this on?

[jwendell]

@rhatdan it's minikube. I don't know which distro they use, probably a custom one built with Buildroot? (based on the contents of /etc/os-release, see above)

[rhatdan]

Well the podman was built on a different system, since it thinks it needs selinux.

[jwendell]

@rhatdan yep, I know. I grabbed the f28 version. That's why I opened this RFE so that we can have a statically linked podman that I can copy over machines and start using it right away!

[rhatdan]

We built a static buildah command, on Fedora, but it seems to crash randomly. I am not sure that Fedora static librarie work real well. What OS is static docker built on?

[afbjorklund]

Both podman and buildah should be available in the minikube OS (which is built with BuildRoot)

There is already an old version of podman, and a pending Pull Request for adding buildah

[rhatdan]

I'm fine with that if it actually works. We can add content to the Makefile to attempt to build podman statically.

[afbjorklund]

Well, it's not really "static podman" so it is a bit off-topic here... But the original author said he was using minikube so thought it was worth mentioning ? It would be nice if they were faster to update it, though.

$ minikube version
minikube version: v0.32.0
$ minikube ssh
                         _             _            
            _         _ ( )           ( )           
  ___ ___  (_)  ___  (_)| |/')  _   _ | |_      __  
/' _ ` _ `\| |/' _ `\| || , <  ( ) ( )| '_`\  /'__`\
| ( ) ( ) || || ( ) || || |\`\ | (_) || |_) )(  ___/
(_) (_) (_)(_)(_) (_)(_)(_) (_)`\___/'(_,__/'`\____)

$ podman --version
WARN[0000] unable to find /etc/containers/registries.conf. some podman (image shortnames) commands may be limited 
podman version 0.4.1
$ 

https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube/releases/tag/v0.32.0
https://github.com/containers/libpod/releases/tag/v0.4.1

[pwFoo]

Any progress with static build? Looks like current build wouldn't Run with alpine linux?

[pwFoo]

During testing I noticed that more than the podman binary is needed to pull and run containers? There are some dependencies / recommended plugins.

• podman
• cni plugins / iptables
• buildah (only needed to build images?)
• conmon
• ...

So what is the minimal podman install requirement to pull images and run containers (with network support)?