Installing podman on Mac M1

If you have a Mac M1 and have been struggling to get podman, a popular alternative to docker-desktop working, this post might be useful to you.

Here are the steps needed:

1. Ensure you have set the architecture on your machine to arm64. You can do that using a command env /usr/bin/arch -arm64 /bin/zsh --login. Type arch again to ensure you get arm64
2. Ensure you have brew configured to work for arm64. You can refer the section “Alternative Installs” under homebrew’s documentation. I would recommend using /opt as the base folder to clone the homebrew git repo and follow rest of the process
3. You can install podman and its dependencies with the command

brew install simnalamburt/x/podman-apple-silicon 

After this test your installation with the following commands

podman machine init
podman machine start
podman run -it --rm docker.io/hello-world

If your installation was successful, you should see “Hello from Docker!” followed by some other information.