Run SPRAS with Podman instead of Docker?

[annaritz]

I'm trying to get Docker installed on my compbio lab machines, which needs to have a rootless version of Docker due to user permissions in the lab. This might be a possible scenario for other people as well (wanting to run SPRAS but not having root access).

Our IT dept suggested MacOS + Podman, a command line tool that uses a library that doesn't depend on a daemon and doesn't require root privileges. It appears that you can run existing Docker images using Podman since they are compatible with the OCI standard (see, for example, this tutorial).

If this would be a useful thing to pursue, we can get Podman installed on our machines and test SPRAS. I imagine this might be similar to the singularity wrappers @agitter wrote, so it would potentially be a larger change (but the code structure seems amenable to it).

[agitter]

If you pursue this, it would be worthwhile to check out https://github.com/containers/podman-py. If that provides an interface to run containers through a Python API, it would be most compatible with our current usage of Docker and Singularity. It would be a manageable amount of work to refactor from supporting two frameworks to three once we have a run_container_podman utility function working.

[agitter]

The changes in #132 would make this easier to configure in a clean way if we do add Podman support.