lazypodman

A lazier way to manage Podman from your terminal.

A fast, keyboard-driven terminal UI for Podman — containers, pods, images, volumes, networks, logs, stats and more, without leaving the shell.

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What is this?

lazypodman is a hard fork of the excellent jesseduffield/lazydocker, re-engineered to talk to Podman natively via its Go bindings (github.com/containers/podman/v5/pkg/bindings) — not through the Docker-compatibility shim. It keeps lazydocker's snappy TUI and adds the features that make Podman worth using on its own terms: pods, generate kube, and quadlets.

Podman is the default backend. Docker remains available as a fallback for mixed environments.

Highlights

• 🦭 Native Podman backend — speaks the Podman API directly (rootless socket auto-discovered); no DOCKER_HOST shim required.
• 📦 Pods panel — list, inspect, remove and prune pods; export any pod to Kubernetes YAML (podman generate kube) from a dedicated tab.
• ⚙️ Quadlets — see your systemd quadlet units and start/stop/restart them.
• 🐳 Docker fallback — set runtime: docker (or LAZYPODMAN_RUNTIME=docker) to drive a Docker daemon instead.
• 🧰 Everything you expect — containers, images, volumes, networks, logs, stats, exec, inspect, prune, custom & bulk commands.
• 🪶 Single static binary — builds CGO-free; nothing to install on the host but the engine.

Podman-only features (pods, kube export, quadlets) appear in the UI only when the active backend supports them — they are exposed through optional capability interfaces and stay hidden on Docker.

Requirements

• Go 1.25+ (to build from source)
• Podman 5.x with the user API socket running, e.g.:

  systemctl --user enable --now podman.socket

  lazypodman auto-discovers $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock (rootless) or /run/podman/podman.sock (rootful), and honours CONTAINER_HOST.
• (optional) a Docker daemon, if you use the docker backend.

Install

Released binary (Linux/macOS)

Once a release is published, install or update the latest binary into ~/.local/bin:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ClaraVnk/lazypodman/main/scripts/install_update_linux.sh | bash

Pre-built archives for Linux, macOS and Windows (amd64/arm64) are attached to each GitHub Release.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/ClaraVnk/lazypodman.git
cd lazypodman

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -mod=vendor \
  -tags 'containers_image_openpgp exclude_graphdriver_btrfs exclude_graphdriver_devicemapper remote' \
  -o lazypodman .

./lazypodman

The build tags are required: they build the Podman bindings tree without the storage graph drivers that need C libraries, keeping the binary CGO-free and portable.

Usage

./lazypodman                             # native Podman (default)
LAZYPODMAN_RUNTIME=docker ./lazypodman   # Docker backend

Navigate panels with the number keys ([1]–[7]) or the arrows; press x for the menu and b for bulk commands. Full keybinding cheatsheets live in docs/keybindings/.

Backend selection

Source	Value	Notes
Env var LAZYPODMAN_RUNTIME	podman | docker	highest precedence
Config runtime:	podman | docker	in your lazypodman config
(default)	podman

Architecture

The TUI never talks to an engine SDK directly — it goes through a runtime.ContainerRuntime interface that deals in lazypodman-owned domain types. Two backends implement it (pkg/runtime/podman, pkg/runtime/docker), and Podman-only features are layered on as optional capability interfaces (PodRuntime, KubeGenerator, QuadletManager) that callers discover via type assertions.

The design decisions are recorded as ADRs in docs/adr/:

ADR	Topic
0001	Hard fork from lazydocker
0002	Phased port: Docker SDK → Podman bindings
0003	Runtime interface & domain types
0004	Staged rewire of pkg/commands
0005	Native Podman backend
0006	Pods & optional capability interfaces
0007	Quadlets management

Project status

The port is functionally complete: the runtime abstraction, the native Podman backend, the default flip to Podman, and the Podman-native features (pods + kube export in the UI, quadlets at the runtime layer) are all in. A dual-backend compliance suite gates parity in CI.

Roadmap odds and ends: a Quadlets UI panel, quadlet enable/disable (autostart), published release binaries, and eventually renaming the Go module once Podman has been the default for a release cycle.

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome. Before opening a PR:

TAGS='containers_image_openpgp exclude_graphdriver_btrfs exclude_graphdriver_devicemapper remote'
GOFLAGS="-mod=vendor -tags=$TAGS" go build ./...
GOFLAGS="-mod=vendor -tags=$TAGS" go test ./...
bash ./test.sh        # race + coverage

CI runs lint (golangci-lint v2), format, tests on Linux + Windows, a build matrix, govulncheck, gitleaks, and the dual-backend compliance suite. Keep commits atomic and use Conventional Commits.

Credits

A hard fork of jesseduffield/lazydocker (MIT). All credit for the original TUI, design and the bulk of the codebase goes to Jesse Duffield and the lazydocker contributors. 💛

Contributors

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to lazypodman:

• @kallioli — Podman runtime fixes and test coverage

License

MIT © 2026 Clara Vanacker — and the original lazydocker authors.