The following describes the process for building the Podman client on Windows.
Windows OS can behave very differently depending on how it was configured. This documentation assumes that one is using
a Windows 11 development machine or a
configuration close to this one. The Podman Windows client installer bundles several tools, which are unnecessary for Podman builds, but this
set of packages is well aligned with GitHub's windows-latest offerings. Some of the tools will still be missing from
this distribution and will have to be manually added after this installation completes.
Pandoc could be installed from https://pandoc.org/installing.html When performing the Pandoc installation one, has to choose the option "Install for all users" (to put the binaries into "Program Files" directory).
The latest release of the WiX Toolset can be obtained from https://wixtoolset.org/docs/wix3/. Installing it into a clean VM might require an additional installation of .NET Framework 3.5 in advance (instructions for adding .NET Framework 3.5 via enabling the Windows feature)
Podman requires brew -- a collection of Unix like build tools and libraries adapted for Windows. More details and installation instructions are available from their home page. There are also premade GitHub actions for this tool that are available.
Podman requires some software from msys2 to be able to build. This can be done using msys2 shell. One can start it from the Start menu. This documentation covers only usage of MSYS2 UCRT64 shell (msys2 shells come preconfigured for different environments).
$ pacman -S git make zip mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-go mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-python
The Pandoc tool installed in a prior step is specific, that is the installer doesn't add the tool to any PATH environment variable known to msys2, so, it has to be linked explicitly to work.
$ mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
$ ln -sf "/c/Program Files/Pandoc/pandoc.exe" "/usr/local/bin/pandoc.exe"
One needs to restart the msys2 shell after dependency installation before proceeding with the build.
One can obtain the latest source code for Podman from its GitHub repository.
$ git clone https://github.com/containers/podman.git go/src/github.com/containers/podman
After completing the preparatory steps of obtaining the Podman source code and installing its dependencies, the client can now be built.
$ cd go/src/github.com/containers/podman
$ make clean podman-remote-release-windows_amd64.zip
The complete distribution will be packaged to the podman-remote-release-windows_amd64.zip file. It is possible to
unzip it and replace files in the default Podman installation with the built ones to use the custom build.
Building Podman by following this documentation can take a fair amount of time and effort. Packaging the installer adds even more overhead. If the only needed artifact is the Podman binary itself, it is possible to build only it with this command:
$ make podman-remote
The binary will be located in bin/windows/. It could be used as drop in replacement for the installed version of
Podman.
It is also possible to cross-build for other platforms by providing GOOS and GOARCH environment variables.
As Windows requires more effort in comparison to Unix systems for installation procedures, it is sometimes easier to pack the changes into a ready-to-use installer. To create the installer, the full client distribution in ZIP format has to be built beforehand.
$ export BUILD_PODMAN_VERSION=$(test/version/version | sed 's/-.*//')
$ mkdir -p contrib/win-installer/current
$ cp podman-remote-release-windows_amd64.zip contrib/win-installer/current/
$ cd contrib/win-installer
$ powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File build.ps1 $BUILD_PODMAN_VERSION dev current
The installer will be located in the contrib/win-installer folder (relative to checkout root) and will have a name
like podman-4.5.0-dev-setup.exe. This could be installed in a similar manner as the official Podman for Windows installers
(when installing unsigned binaries is allowed on the host).
To learn how to use the Podman client, refer to its tutorial.