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Last time I checked podman compose was only a superficial docker compose equivalent. Also stuff like inotify seems to randomly break a lot on the podman side.

I'd love to be able to recommend people use podman but not having a good docker compose compatibility and missing inotify on volumes makes the DX just too problematic.

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You can use actual docker-compose with podman, the -compose projects are separate from podman/docker.

podman-compose never worked well for me but docker-compose on podman did.

The CLI plugin or the script? Last time I checked the podman CLI did not support docker CLI plugins and the script is EOL since years.

Podman has supported plugin compose (v2) for years now, and I believe that's the version I used before I switched to Quadlets, but I must have not needed Buildkit features back then because those are apparently still unsupported over v2.

> for years

Don't know about that. I did a ddg search "using docker compose (v2) plugin with podman" I do get some tutorials but they all are from 2026. This also aligns with my experience from late 2024 where you where typical advised to use `podman compose` or the compose script.

Here's the 2022 release announcement for Podman 4.1 claiming support for compose v2. Your distro may have been stuck with an older Podman version for much longer though.

https://podman.io/release/2022/05/09/podman-release-v4.1.0

docker-compose (v1) is obsolete. The new version (v2) is a plugin for the docker CLI.

See my answer to your sibling comment. Podman supports v2 but not with Buildkit.

Check again? I don't have any issues like this and use podman compose in prod.

I spent about a week last year trying to move from docker+compose plugin to a podman hosted variant. It has issues on multiple stages of the lifecycle as I mentioned in my original comment. Mac users lose fs events, a lot of compose.yml features are flaky (post start events), buggy (reset and import), or just not implemented (don't remember the exact features).

If you use podman and have no issues that is awesome but your use case is probably quite narrow, you are most probably on a non fedora based Linux and keep compose usage to a minimum.

It was a pain when i tried it like 5 years ago for what it’s worth.

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