This extension for Podman Desktop enables users to create bootable operating system disk images directly from Containerfiles. It targets developers and system administrators looking to streamline OS provisioning and deployment, offering a novel approach to generating various disk image formats from containerized OS definitions.

How It Works

The extension leverages the bootc-image-builder tool to transform Containerfiles into bootable disk images. This approach allows for transactional updates to the deployed OS by pulling new container images, eliminating the need to rebuild entire disk images for updates. It supports multiple Linux distributions like CentOS Stream, Fedora, and RHEL, and can output images in formats such as qcow2, AMI, RAW, and ISO.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Installation: Install via the Podman Desktop Extensions Catalog.
• Prerequisites: Podman Desktop 1.10.0+, Podman 5.0.1+. macOS/Windows require Podman Machine with rootful mode enabled and at least 6GB RAM allocated. Linux requires escalated privileges (sudo) for the build process.
• Setup Time: Image build takes approximately 2-5 minutes.
• Documentation: Fedora Getting Started Guide

Highlighted Details

• Supports generating disk images for QEMU, AWS AMI, RAW, Anaconda ISO, vSphere VMDK, VirtualBox VHD, and Google Cloud GCE.
• Enables transactional OS updates by pulling new container images.
• Provides example Containerfiles for CentOS Stream 9, Fedora 42, and RHEL 9/10.

Maintenance & Community

• Contributions are welcomed via the CONTRIBUTING document.

Licensing & Compatibility

• The extension itself is not explicitly licensed in the README, but it relies on Podman and bootc-image-builder, which are typically under permissive licenses like Apache 2.0 or MIT. Compatibility with commercial or closed-source projects is likely, but requires verification of underlying component licenses.

Limitations & Caveats

Cross-architecture image builds are known to be problematic on macOS and Windows due to QEMU limitations, with workarounds provided involving Podman Machine configuration and manual QEMU binary overrides.