How to install Podman on Ubuntu 24.04 step by step

Podman can usually be installed on Ubuntu 24.04 directly from the official package re­pos­it­or­ies using just a few commands. This makes setting up Podman on Ubuntu par­tic­u­larly straight­for­ward, even for beginners.

Step 1: Check the pre­requis­ites for in­stall­a­tion

Before beginning the in­stall­a­tion, make sure Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is installed and con­figured on your system. You will also need terminal access and a user account with sudo priv­ileges to install and update system packages. An active internet con­nec­tion is required to download the Docker al­tern­at­ive Podman and its de­pend­en­cies from the Ubuntu package re­pos­it­or­ies.

For initial tests and smaller container projects, a VPS is usually suf­fi­cient for running Podman on Ubuntu. A dedicated server may be the better option if you plan to run several con­tain­ers at the same time, use resource-intensive ap­plic­a­tions or create a pre­dict­able en­vir­on­ment for pro­duc­tion workloads.

Podman itself has re­l­at­ively modest system re­quire­ments. However, your server should have enough free storage space, at least 2 GB of RAM and a properly main­tained Ubuntu in­stall­a­tion.

Step 2: Update the package lists

In­stalling Podman on Ubuntu only takes a few steps. Start by updating your system’s package lists so Ubuntu can retrieve the latest available package in­form­a­tion from the con­figured re­pos­it­or­ies.

sudo apt update

You can then op­tion­ally update all installed packages to their latest versions:

sudo apt upgrade -y

This step is par­tic­u­larly useful on freshly set-up systems, as it updates existing packages and libraries. This reduces the like­li­hood of un­ne­ces­sary version conflicts occurring later during the in­stall­a­tion.

Step 3: Enable the Universe re­pos­it­ory

On Ubuntu 24.04, software sources are typically con­figured using files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. Podman is available through the Universe re­pos­it­ory, which may not be enabled in some in­stall­a­tions. If necessary, activate it with the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update

On many systems, Universe is already active. In that case, the command does no harm; it simply confirms the existing con­fig­ur­a­tion.

Step 4: Install Podman

You can now install Podman directly using the package manager:

sudo apt install podman -y

Ubuntu 24.04 includes Podman in its standard package re­pos­it­or­ies, so there is no need to add a third-party source or use a separate in­stall­a­tion script. The APT package manager downloads Podman and its required de­pend­en­cies auto­mat­ic­ally and installs them on your system.

Step 5: Verify the in­stall­a­tion

After in­stall­a­tion, verify that Podman has been set up correctly by checking the installed version:

podman --version

If the in­stall­a­tion was suc­cess­ful, the output will display the installed Podman version.

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You can also use the following command to display more detailed in­form­a­tion about the Podman en­vir­on­ment:

podman info

This command shows, among other things, in­form­a­tion about the host en­vir­on­ment, storage and runtime con­fig­ur­a­tions, as well as the container re­gis­tries in use. Es­pe­cially if problems occur later on, podman info is often one of the first useful dia­gnost­ic commands.

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Step 6: Verify the in­stall­a­tion with a test container

The simplest way to check that Podman is not only installed but also working correctly is to run a small test container. You can use the hello-world container for this purpose and start it with the following command:

podman run --rm hello-world

If the image is not already available locally, Podman downloads it auto­mat­ic­ally from a container registry such as Docker Hub before starting the container. The --rm option removes the test container as soon as it finishes running. If the test is suc­cess­ful, a short message confirms that Podman can run con­tain­ers correctly.

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The first run may take a little longer if Podman needs to download the image from a registry. This is normal. Once the image is stored locally, sub­sequent runs are usually much faster.