podman-mcp

A daemon-less FastMCP 3.5 control plane for Podman on Windows and WSL2 — containers, pods, compose stacks, system analytics, and a glass React web dashboard.

❓ What is Podman?

Podman (Pod Manager) is a lightweight, open-source container engine designed as a modern alternative to Docker.

While Docker relies on a monolithic background service (the Docker Daemon, dockerd) which can occasionally lock up or consume high idle resources on Windows, Podman operates on a daemon-less and rootless-first architecture:

• Zero Idle Overhead: Since there is no background daemon running 24/7, Podman consumes virtually no memory or CPU when your containers are stopped.

• Fork-Exec Process Model: Every container runs as a direct child process of your shell session, avoiding single-point-of-failure engine crashes.

• Native Kubernetes Pods: Podman allows you to group multiple containers into a single shared namespace (a Pod), making local development match Kubernetes production environments.

• Docker-CLI Compatible: Podman matches the Docker CLI commands. You can simply alias docker to podman and keep using your existing scripts.

Install

Related MCP server: Docker MCP Server

Ports

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/sandraschi/podman-mcp
cd podman-mcp
uv sync
.\start.ps1

Opens dashboard on http://127.0.0.1:11112. API bridge on 11113.

What You Can Do

• "List all running containers and show resource usage."

• "Deploy my compose stack and verify every service is healthy."

• "Compare nginx:1.25 and nginx:1.26 — what changed?"

• "Analyze container my-app — why is it restarting?"

• "Back up my database volume before the upgrade."

Feature Overview

Documentation

Requirements

Python 3.12+, Podman Engine 20.10+, Node.js 20+ (dev). Rust 1.70+ (Tauri build only).

License

MIT