Technology preview: Running a container inside a container

Watch this step-by-step tutorial on how to run a container inside of Podman in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3.

Posted: March 16, 2021 by Brian Smith (Sudoer alumni, Red Hat)

Clay pot vases stacked inside of each other — ^{Image by Luisella Planeta Leoni from Pixabay}

I recently published a video covering an overview of Podman in Podman, or in other words, running a container within a container. This is a technology preview feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3.

The video covers an overview of:

From the RHEL 8.3 host, starting a container using the registry.redhat.io/rhel8/podman container image (with the --privileged option)
Within that container, building a new container image using podman build
Running a container (while in a container) using the newly created container image (Podman in Podman)

Please note that Podman in Podman functionality is currently only available when starting the container as root.

[ Getting started with containers? Check out this free course. Deploying containerized applications: A technical overview. ]

Check out these related articles on Enable Sysadmin

Pulling podman images from a container repository

Check out podman's new container image pulling options.

Exploring additional image stores in Podman

Use the additionalimagestores field to set up read-only shared image storage for multiple Podman containers.

Sneak peek: Podman's new REST API

Podman is a tool for running containers on your Linux system. Take a little look at what's coming in Podman version 2.0.

Topics: Containers Linux Podman

Brian Smith

Brian Smith is a product manager at Red Hat focused on RHEL automation and management. He has been at Red Hat since 2018, previously working with public sector customers as a technical account manager (TAM). More about me