Help installing podman under MacOS

Help
1

Hi, first time user here, and need help installing podman.

So I tried the nix-shell -p podman as recommended from the web page, but there are two problems.

  • the web page NixOS Search says the poman is of version: 4.7.2, however this is what I got:
$ nix-channel --list
nixpkgs https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-stable

$ podman --version
podman version 4.8.2

and that version 4.8.2 should be only for unstable, as per NixOS Search.

BTW, I tried to swtich from the unstable channel to stable myself, and seem the above url is incorrect, as I’m getting:

$ nix-channel --update
error: unable to download 'https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-stable': HTTP error 404

       response body:

       <html>
       <head><title>404 Not Found</title></head>
       <body>
       <h1>404 Not Found</h1>
       <ul>
       <li>Code: NoSuchKey</li>
       <li>Message: The specified key does not exist.</li>
       <li>Key: nixpkgs-stable</li>
       <li>RequestId: XHD9X2ZFQN8448XS</li>
       <li>HostId: M5/p9hEqHdctcSUP2YYXJYptZjv9of+0wD3wequoN/iUWJ2onDNu9SCh6oUX5At8VLyVL/iPrS8=</li>
       ...
  • the second problem I have is that installing podman with either homebrew or macports will install its dependencies automatically, however I found that installing podman with nix won’t – the qemu package is not auto-installed. I’m wondering it is nix’s “feature”, or the podman package’s problem.

UPDATE:

So I was trying to install the missing qemu package myself, and I’ve tried all the following commands, but they all end up with error message somehow:

nix-shell -p podman nixpkgs.qemu_full
nix-shell -p podman qemu_full
nix-shell -p podman ubootQemuAarch64
NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNSUPPORTED_SYSTEM=1 nix-shell -p podman ubootQemuAarch64

All in all, I want a working stable podman, please help this clueless poor guy. thx.

2

nixpkgs-stable is not a real channel. This is the list of available channels: https://channels.nixos.org/

You probably want:

nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixpkgs-23.11 nixpkgs
nix-channel --update

That’s why you’re getting the error. You’re also likely getting the unstable version of podman because you haven’t been able to update your channels since switching to a nonexistent channel.

Well, its “dependencies” should be installed properly by nix. What might not be installed are things like system daemons, which homebrew & co can install (because they’re specifically designed to make services run inside MacOS, while nix and nixpkgs are largely not, they just build binaries that can run on most unixes - that doesn’t mean the software will be installed according to how the unix flavor wants things to be installed, for that you need nix-darwin), but afaik podman can run in user-only mode without needing any background services or setuid binaries or anything, so this should usually not be an issue.

Why exactly do you think the dependencies are not installed?

3

Oh, thanks for the reply. Please see my updated OP. thx.

4

Starting from scratch, this is all that I’m trying now under my MacOS:

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-23.11-darwin
nix-channel --update

so far so good, but then,

nix-shell -p podman qemu_full
NIXPKGS_ALLOW_UNSUPPORTED_SYSTEM=1 nix-shell -p podman qemu_full

they both end up with error message one way or another.

UPDATE:

I finally found a way to start nix-shell without any errors, but was stopped at next step:

nix-shell -p podman qemu edk2

[nix-shell:~]$ podman machine start
Starting machine "podman-machine-default"
Waiting for VM ...
Error: qemu exited unexpectedly with exit code 1, stderr: qemu-system-aarch64: -drive file=/opt/local/share/qemu/edk2-aarch64-code.fd,if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on: Could  not open '/opt/local/share/qemu/edk2-aarch64-code.fd': No such file or directory

UPDATE2:

found a “solution” for the above problem,

https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/17026#issuecomment-1520815934

But everything mentioned there are Greek to me, and I have no idea what the fixes should be. thx for your help.