Run podman remote from windows to WSL2

[tungphuong]

Hello, I set up success Podman with WSL2 on Windows 11; can run the container with the Podman CLI in WSL2.

Now I want to access it remotely from the Window host, but I cannot find any document to guide me to set up it and it seems that we cannot start socket/Rest API for the Podman server.

In WSL2, when running podman --remote info, got the exception
Error: cannot connect to the Podman socket, please verify that Podman REST API service is running: Get "http://d/v3.3.1/libpod/_ping": dial unix ///mnt/wslg/runtime-dir/podman/podman.sock: connect: no such file or directory

Please share how to use it remotely or does it support this feature for WSL2 yet?

[mheon]

@baude PTAL

You'll need to either make the Podman socket available to the filesystem of the Windows host (not familiar enough with WSL2 to know how/if this is possible) or tell podman system service in the container to bind to a port on localhost and access it via that port.

[afbjorklund]

I don't think the Windows file system supports Unix sockets, at least it didn't for the QEMU sockets (required fifo instead)

[rhatdan]

Well you could setup Podman service to listen on a network port, but be careful.

[tungphuong]

Thanks, do you have any guidelines or documents to set up? I look around but cannot find any relevant documents.

[afbjorklund]

I think we are normally using ssh for this purpose, on the other platforms (e.g. Mac)

[vrothberg]

Ping. Do we have a tutorial on that? I don´t know of any.

[rhatdan]

@tungphuong man podman-system-service is the best we have.
But realize you are opening a pipe to full access to the user account which is listening on the TCP socket. So if you run this command as root and anyone can connnect to the socket, then they can get full root on your system.

[github-actions[bot]]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[rhatdan]

I am not sure what is required to go forward with this issue or to close it. Thoughts?

[rhatdan]

Moving to discussion for now.

[tungphuong]

I found the article to solve my question. I tried and can use podman client or Tye to access podman server in WSL2

https://www.devcon5.ch/en/blog/2021/10/14/podman-for-windows/

[johan-laneau]

I took some time to experiment and I got it working in a slighlty different configuration than what is mentioned in the article mentioned by tungphuong:

Server:

Create podman WSL instance:

We assume that you have WSL 2 already setup on your machine.
It is possible to install podman in your existing WSL 2 instance. However, I choose to create a separate WSL 2 instance because it nicely separates podman from the rest of WSL2. This also mimics how Docker Desktop separates docker and WSL2 instances.
We use docker (ironically) to create the WSL image file. This method is taken from microsoft documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/use-custom-distro). Perhaps there is a more direct method to create the .tar file.

• Create a docker container that contains podman (thanks mgoltzsche)
  docker run -t mgoltzsche/podman:3.4 ls /
• Create a tar file from this contain. Check the ID that you need to use.
  docker export 7a4da03559be > C:\Temp\mgoltzsche_podman_3.4.tar
• Clean-up the container and image because we don't need them anymore
  docker container rm 7a4da03559be
docker image rm mgoltzsche/podman:3.4
• Import the tar file as a new wsl distro called "podman"
  mkdir C:\wslDistroStorage\mgoltzsche_podman_3.4
wsl --import podman C:\wslDistroStorage\mgoltzsche_podman_3.4 C:\Temp\mgoltzsche_podman_3.4.tar

Launch server

wsl -d podman podman system service --time=0 tcp:localhost:1234
We run the service directly instead of the systemctl recommended by podman (see https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/tutorials/remote_client.md#enable-the-podman-service-on-the-server-machine) because WSL2 does not have systemd (yet).
We expose the podman service over tcp which is not the safest but requires the least configuration compared to ssh configuration in Windows.
This command should be run before starting to work with podman. You can run this automatically at start-up with different ways.

Windows environment

• install podman remote (API version must match version of API of server) from e.g. https://github.com/containers/podman/releases/download/v3.4.4/podman-v3.4.4.msi
• configure podman to use WSL2 server
  podman system connection add podman_wsl tcp://localhost:1234
• testing:
  podman run hello-world

WSL2 environment

Optionally, you can also install podman remote in the WSL2 instance and connect to the server as in the windows machine. We use the static builds for easy installation and dependency management.
curl -fsSL -o podman-linux-amd64.tar.gz https://github.com/mgoltzsche/podman-static/releases/latest/download/podman-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf podman-linux-amd64.tar.gz
sudo cp -r podman-linux-amd64/usr podman-linux-amd64/etc /
podman system connection add podman_wsl tcp://localhost:1234
testing
podman --remote run hello-world
Note that you always use "--remote" to force podman to work remote in the WSL instance.

As a convenience in WSL2, add an alias to avoid forgetting the --remote: alias podman="podman --remote". You can add this to you ~/.bashrc if you want. Test again:
podman run hello-world