Podman Documentation

The online man pages and other documents regarding Podman can be found at Read The Docs. The man pages can be found under the Commands link on that page.

Build the Docs

Directory Structure

	Directory
Markdown source for man pages	docs/source/markdown/
man pages aliases as .so files	docs/source/markdown/links/
target for output	docs/build
man pages	docs/build/man
remote linux man pages	docs/build/remote/linux
remote darwin man pages	docs/build/remote/darwin
remote windows html pages	docs/build/remote/windows

Support files

docs/remote-docs.sh	Read the docs/source/markdown files and format for each platform
docs/links-to-html.lua	pandoc filter to do aliases for html files
docs/use-pagetitle.lua	pandoc filter to set html document title

Manpage Syntax

The syntax for the formatting of all man pages can be found here.

API Reference

The latest online documentation is automatically generated by two cooperating automation systems based on committed upstream source code. Firstly, the Cirrus-CI docs task builds pkg/api/swagger.yaml and uploads it to a public-facing location (Google Storage Bucket - an online service for storing unstructured data). Second, Read The Docs reacts to the github.com repository change, building the content for the libpod documentation site. This site includes for the API section, some javascript which consumes the uploaded swagger.yaml file directly from the Google Storage Bucket.

Since there are multiple systems and local cache is involved, it's possible that updates to documentation (especially the swagger/API docs) will lag by 10-or-so minutes. However, because the client (i.e. your web browser) is fetching content from multiple locations that do not share a common domain, accessing the API section may show a stack-trace similar to the following:

If reloading the page, or clearing your local cache does not fix the problem, it is likely caused by broken metadata needed to protect clients from cross-site-scripting style attacks. Please notify a maintainer so they may investigate how/why the swagger.yaml file's CORS-metadata is incorrect, or the file isn't accessible for some other reason.

Local Testing

To build standard man pages, run make docs. Results will be in docs/build/man.

To build HTMLized man pages: Assuming that you have the dependencies installed, then also install (showing Fedora in the example):

$ sudo dnf install python3-sphinx python3-recommonmark
$ pip install sphinx-markdown-tables myst_parser

(The above dependencies are current as of 2022-09-15. If you experience problems, please see requirements.txt in this directory, it will almost certainly be more up-to-date than this README.)

After that completes, cd to the docs directory in your Podman sandbox and then do make html.

You can then preview the html files in docs/build/html with:

python -m http.server 8000 --directory build/html

...and point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/