Podman - Command not found?

[IAmIlliest]

Hi,

I installed podman via mise use -g podman@latest

Thereafter, when I run podman it yields (Ubuntu 24.04):

Command 'podman' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install podman

mise where podman ends up pointing to an oddly named binary (presumably because it's a static build?):

/home/user/.local/share/mise/installs/podman/5.8.1/podman-remote-static-linux_amd64

Running this command works:
/home/user/.local/share/mise/installs/podman/5.8.1/podman-remote-static-linux_amd64 --version

A quick look at ~/.config/mise/config.toml shows:

[tools]
podman = { version = "latest", matching = "podman-remote" }

I haven't seen that syntax in there before. Two questions I'm hoping for help with:

1. What's the 'matching =' really doing, and does it have an unspecified wildcard, or do i need to change it something like: podman = { version = "latest", matching = "podman-remote-.*" }
2. I tried doing a mise tool-alias set "podman-remote-static-linux_amd64" "podman" "latest" but that hasn't helped (I'm not clear on exactly what type of issue mise tool aliases are intended to solve)... Is this the right way to get a call to the standard shell command of just podman to call the mise version?

I know I can fix this with bash shell aliases or symlinks etc, my goal though is to understand how to make this work in mise.

EDIT:
Other commands aren't so good, looks like the mise install of podman is broken in some way?
A 'podman ps' equivalent of: /home/user/.local/share/mise/installs/podman/5.8.1/podman-remote-static-linux_amd64 ps produces:

Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using podman system connection list, or try podman machine init and podman machine start to manage a new Linux VM
Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: Get "http://d/v5.8.1/libpod/_ping": dial unix /run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock: connect: no such file or directory

Thanks

[crossterra-agent]

Created planner discussion: https://github.com/CrossTerra/monorepo/discussions/2002

[IAmIlliest]

Okay, turns out mise has [shell-alias]'s, which in the root config.toml is at least one 'mise way' of solving how to get the basic 'podman' shell command working:
mise shell-alias set "podman" "/home/user/.local/share/mise/installs/podman/5.8.1/podman-remote-static-linux_amd64"

However. the broken podman install question remains, as does a better understanding of why i need an alias at all since the 'matching =' doesn't seem to be working?

[roele]

It seems that matching is a leftover from the time podman was provided via ubi backend. Nowadays it uses the github backend and should probably define the rename_exe option instead. As a temporary workaround until the fix makes into the registry the following should work...

mise use github:containers/podman[rename_exe=podman]

PR #8633

[IAmIlliest]

Thank you for the explanation. The command you provided for mise worked smoothly, though I'm still getting the socket error.

I'm thinking that may be something on my end that is unrelated to mise, so I will see what I can work out there.,

[IAmIlliest]

Bare with me if I'm doing this wrong, I'm still finding my way with both Podman and Mise.

My intent here, is to have a system wide installation of Podman (available to all users), but run Podman in rootless mode. As such, all calls to the shared podman binary would be from non-root users.

I've tried installing podman a number ways, all of which seem to be failing to create the socket, as they return the same response from a podman info call (just with varying paths).

Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using podman system connection list, or try podman machine init and podman machine start to manage a new Linux VM
Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: Get "http://d/v5.8.1/libpod/_ping": dial unix /run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock: connect: no such file or directory
(uid 1000 is my non-root user, which made the call to podman info)

I'll detail earlier attempts on the install options in a separate post below, but I figured this is worth mention early on.
I tried using 'mise installl --system' (as both root and non-root). I tried installing two packages in succession using this approach, and it looks like mise is getting confused?
Podman latest is 5.8.1, usage is 3.0.0.

First I ran:

user@NUC8i7HNK:~$ sudo -i
root@NUC8i7HNK:~# mise install --system github:containers/podman[rename_exe=podman]@latest

Then:

root@NUC8i7HNK:~# mise install --system usage@latest

Which produces:

usage@3.0.0 extract usage-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz ✔
mise ERROR failed to rebuild runtime symlinks
mise ERROR failed to ln -sf ./5.8.1 /root/.local/share/mise/installs/github-containers-podman/latest
mise ERROR No such file or directory (os error 2)
mise ERROR Run with --verbose or MISE_VERBOSE=1 for more information

It seems like it is attempting the symlink operation from the path associated with the first call to mise install --system (hence the podman references?)

[IAmIlliest]

EDIT:
Scratch all this. The static binary that Mise can obtain is just the remote client binary (i.e. to run commands locally as if podman was installed on localhost, but the remote client actually proxies the commands to a remote server with a full installed Podman instance. As such, this will never work through Mise to the best of my knowledge as the installable version of podman on linux must be built from source?
https://github.com/containers/podman/releases

ORIGINAL POST:
In regards to install approaches, I've tried combinations of:

• Calling the non-root users mise binary via sudo, i.e. sudo "$(which mise)" ...... (this results in a bit of config chaos and was probably a bad idea to try)
• mise install --system .... as non-root user
• mise install --system .... as root
• sudo mise install --system as non-root user.
• mise use -g .... as root.
• sudo mise use -g ... as non-root

Putting aside the --system issue mentioned in the post above, my Initial thinking was using the non-root mise binary with sudo privileges might allow the podman socket to be created. It did not. It also caused a bit of config chaos. All in all, this was a poor idea, I think.

All the non-elevated attempts to install via mise in anyway (mise use -g or mise install --system fail to create the socket, presumably because root is needed for that???).

After sudo -i and installing mise for the root user, I tried using both mise use -g and mise install --system (followed by a mise use -g <the package> which results in mise list showing the version as a system package). These also fail to create the socket. I must be missing something about Podman.

[roele]

You're right this is misleading, since mise does not run installer packages and picks the archive containing podman-remote. This is the plain CLI tool but does not include other necessary components the deskop installer provides.