Budibase customers have successfully run Budibase using Podman as the container engine. The usage is very similar to Docker but we are adding notes here for any caveats.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Testing on RHEL 8.7 and using Podman version 4.2.0 deploying Budibase with podman is similar to the docker command:

mkdir -p /data/budibase
podman run -p 80:80 -v /data/budibase:/data:Z -e INTERNAL_API_KEY=changeme -e JWT_SECRET=changeme  \
-e MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=minio -e MINIO_SECRET_KEY=changeme -e REDIS_PASSWORD=changeme \
-e COUCHDB_USER=admin -e COUCHDB_PASSWORD=changeme --name budibasetest  -d registry.hub.docker.com/budibase/budibase

The :Z option on the volume asks Podman to relabel the volume content to match the label inside the container.

Debian 11

At the time of writing Debian 11 supplies version 3 of Podman in the official repositories. We have experienced some networking issues with this version which manifests as an inability to load the App templates.

For Debian 11 the example below uses podman packages from alvistack to install version 4.3.1-1 and netavark for networking:

source  /etc/os-release
wget http://downloadcontent.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/alvistack/Debian_$VERSION_ID/Release.key -O alvistack_key
cat alvistack_key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/alvistack.gpg  >/dev/null
echo "deb http://downloadcontent.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/alvistack/Debian_$VERSION_ID/ /" | sudo tee  /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alvistack.list
apt update
apt install podman python3-podman-compose podman-netavark 

For convenience configure podman to check the docker registry by default. Create the file:

/etc/containers/registries.conf

And add the following:

unqualified-search-registries = ['docker.io']

[[registry]]  
prefix = "docker.io"  
location = "docker.io"

Then create the file:

/etc/containers/containers.conf

Adding the following:

[network]  
network_backend = "netavark"

Create the data directory and run the container:

mkdir -p /data/budibase

podman run -p 80:80 -v /data/budibase:/data -e INTERNAL_API_KEY=changeme -e JWT_SECRET=changeme  
-e MINIO_ACCESS_KEY=minio -e MINIO_SECRET_KEY=changeme -e REDIS_PASSWORD=changeme  
-e COUCHDB_USER=admin -e COUCHDB_PASSWORD=changeme --name budibasetest  -d budibase/budibase