Using Podman with Quarkus and Testcontainers on MacOS M1

Switching to use Podman instead of Docker for spinning up Testcontainers on MacOS just takes a bit of install and configuring. The main reason for the changes is the assumption that Testcontainers makes about the general availability of a Docker socket. Podman is daemonless.

This assumes you are using homebrew to manage packages on MacOS.

Edit ~/.testcontainers.properties and add the following line:

ryuk.container.privileged=true

Then run the following:

brew install podman
sudo /usr/local/bin/podman-mac-helper install
podman machine init -v $HOME:$HOME
podman machine set --rootful
podman machine set --cpus 2
podman machine set --memory 4096
podman machine start
podman machine ssh

Once you are sshed into the podman machine, run the following commands:

sudo -i
rpm-ostree install qemu-user-static
systemctl reboot

NOTE: The systemctl reboot does restart the podman machine however, this restart doesn’t mount the $HOME directory. You must manually recycle the VM using podman machine stop and podman machine start. I’d like those two hours back.

After the VM restarts, update your shell profile of choice to add the alias.

alias docker=podman

Reference: https://github.com/quarkusio/quarkus/issues/22919#issuecomment-1169815274

NOTE: Weird SSH Issues on a Mac

I ran into some weird issues when I recreated the VM with more memory and couldn’t ssh into the VM.

stephennimmo@~ % podman machine ssh
Connecting to vm podman-machine-default. To close connection, use `~.` or `exit`
ssh: Could not resolve hostname localhost: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

After looking all around the /etc/hosts file, restarting the machine, and trying explicitely sshing into the machine with ssh -i ~/.ssh/podman-machine-default core@localhost:<port>, I found the ssh config file documentation and added an entry to it. This solved the problem.

stephennimmo@~ % touch ~/.ssh/config
stephennimmo@~ % chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config
stephennimmo@~ % vi ~/.ssh/config
Host localhost
    HostName 127.0.0.1

:wq!

Reference: https://linuxize.com/post/using-the-ssh-config-file