There’s also the ability for podman to run as a system service, and provide an OCI compatible container API. This then integrates seamlessly with the actual docker-compose.
I do that!
It's 99.999% compatible as the podman people basicaly reimplemented all the docker daemon APIs.
It sometimes lags a bit behind, because sometime docker implements new stuff... But for usage with docker-compose it has worked flawlessly for me.
EDIT: you can also export the podman unix socket via socat, i also tried it to run a rootless docker runtime in kubernetes (podman daemon running as a pod, to run docker builds in kubernetes) as an experiment. It works but i'd love to see a better integration with Gitlab runner project.
Gitlab is supposedly getting podman support any time soon, in 15.1 IIRC ?
So like, you can use docker compose for podman instead of docker, instead of something like podman compose?
You have to point your $DOCKER_HOST to the podman unix socket or something, but other than that it’s the actual docker-compose experience. Via the env var trick you could even use the actual docker binary. But you could just alias docker to podman and it works the same, by design!