Using the Docker integration with Podman container runtime

Docs > Agent > Agent Guides > Using the Docker integration with Podman container runtime

Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Read more on https://podman.io/.

Podman is an alternative to Docker as it provides a Docker-compatible CLI interface and socket. This specificity allows you to use the Datadog Agent Docker integration with Podman containers.

Requirements

Podman version >= 3.2.0
Podman configured to expose its communication socket.
Datadog Agent version >= 7.30.0

Agent deployment as a podman container

To deploy the Agent as a Podman container, the command to run is similar to the one used for Docker.

$ podman run -d --name dd-agent \
    -v /run/podman/podman.sock:/run/podman/podman.sock:ro \
    -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro \
    -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro \
    -e DD_API_KEY=<API_KEY> \
    -e DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/podman/podman.sock \
    --privileged \
    gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:latest

The two important differences are:

-v /run/podman/podman.sock:/run/podman/podman.sock:ro to mount the Podman socket instead of the Docker socket.
-e DOCKER_HOST=unix:///run/podman/podman.sock to configure the Agent communication with the Podman socket.

When running Podman in daemonless mode, instead of these options, you must mount the directory where the Podman database is located, which is /var/lib/containers by default:

-v /var/lib/containers/:/var/lib/containers/.

Known limitations

The activation of the Podman socket can be optional depending on your setup. It may need to be enabled.