Experimental Scanner - Podman

Use Podman as the container engine when running fossa container analysis.

2 min readUpdated Jul 10, 2026

Experimental Scanner - Podman

fossa-cli can use podman client to perform container image scanning analysis.

Integration via Podman's Docker Compatible API

fossa-cli will look for environment variable DOCKER_HOST, to infer docker engine api's socket location. As of now, fossa-cli only works with unix:// socket.

For podman, you can use podman machine start command, to retrieve Docker client compatible DOCKER_HOST.

Shell

➜ podman machine startStarting machine "podman-machine-default"Waiting for VM ...Mounting volume... /Users/fossa:/Users/fossa This machine is currently configured in rootless mode. If your containersrequire root permissions (e.g. ports < 1024), or if you run into compatibilityissues with non-podman clients, you can switch using the following command: 	podman machine set --rootful API forwarding listening on: /Users/fossa/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/podman-machine-default/podman.sock The system helper service is not installed; the default Docker API socketaddress can\'t be used by podman. If you would like to install it run thefollowing commands: 	sudo /usr/local/Cellar/podman/4.2.0/bin/podman-mac-helper install	podman machine stop; podman machine start You can still connect Docker API clients by setting DOCKER_HOST using thefollowing command in your terminal session: 	export DOCKER_HOST='unix:///Users/fossa/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/podman-machine-default/podman.sock' Machine "podman-machine-default" started successfully

Now we can specify DOCKER_HOST when running fossa-cli.

Shell

DOCKER_HOST='unix:///Users/fossa/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/podman-machine-default/podman.sock' fossa container analyze

Likewise, if you are using podman-remote, you should be able to use generate unix socket, and use it with fossa-cli. Refer to documentation below for more details.

Refer to documentation here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230405171636/https://podman.io/blogs/2020/07/01/rest-versioning.html
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/_static/api.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20220926013308/https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/building_running_and_managing_containers/assembly_using-the-container-tools-api_building-running-and-managing-containers

Integration via Podman Executables

fossa-cli will perform the following command:

Shell

# check if image existspodman image inspect <ARG> # export said image to temporary location,# and perform analysis on exported image.podman save --format docker-archive -o <temp-path>

fossa-cli will look for podman executable in $PATH.

Note

Note this is same approach as integration via Docker Archive except that fossa-cli performs necessary invocation and does cleanup of artifacts.

Integration via Docker Archive

We can manually export image using podman, and analyze such image with fossa-cli.

Shell

podman build . -t someImg:1.0.0podman save --format docker-archive -o image.tar fossa container analyze image.tar # Cleanuprm image.tar