Install Podman on Windows Subsystem for Linux

Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode.

Podman is supported on Windows but by default sets up during install it's own WSL2 instance, which is great if you are fine using Windows powershell to run podman commands, but in my case I heavily rely on my custom Ubuntu WSL instance to work on Windows, so I want to be able to run podman there.

This document shows how to install Podman in Ubuntu WSL2 (tested with Podman v3.4.4 on Ubuntu 22.04).

Install required dependencies:

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install -y podman qemu-system

Initialize Podman machine:

podman machine init

Download required gvproxy binary from GitHub releases e.g.:

sudo wget https://github.com/containers/gvisor-tap-vsock/releases/download/v0.6.1/gvproxy-linux -O /usr/libexec/podman/gvproxy
sudo chmod +x /usr/libexec/podman/gvproxy

Grant rw access to kvm, required to start Podman machine:

sudo chmod 666 /dev/kvm

Start Podman machine:

podman machine start