This tutorial teachs you how to use an existing application.

By default, podenv setup the applications defined in podenv/hub, and you can get the list by using the --list argument:

$ podenv --list
[...]

You can get an application details by using the --show argument.

$ podenv --show firefox
[...]

You can start an application by giving it's name to the podenv argument:

$ podenv firefox
[firefox window appears]

Podenv automatically built the container image if it wasn't already available:

$ podman images
REPOSITORY                                  TAG                   IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
localhost/podenv/firefox                    latest                713d6fa70a9f   46 seconds ago   556 MB

The firefox application doesn't have access to the host files and when you close the window, the browser configuration, its bookmarks and the history are lost. To prevent that, most application expect you to pick a storage location for their data. You can use the --volume command line argument to define a host directory as the application home:

$ podenv --volume ~/.config/firefox-pod:~/ firefox
[firefox window appears]

$ ls -ap ~/.config/firefox-pod/
.cache/  .mozilla/

More generally, some settings can be configured through the command line, get the list from the --help output.

Podenv enables in-place container build using the --update argument:

$ podenv --update firefox
STEP 1: FROM localhost/podenv/firefox
STEP 2: RUN dnf update -y
[...]
Complete!
STEP 3: COMMIT podenv/firefox

If the update is broken, you can rollback by restoring the previous image. You can get it's id by running:

$ podman images --all
REPOSITORY                                  TAG                   IMAGE ID       CREATED          SIZE
localhost/podenv/firefox                    latest                622df31ab30b   6 minutes ago    735 MB
<none>                                      <none>                713d6fa70a9f   21 minutes ago   556 MB

$ podman tag 713d6fa70a9f localhost/podenv/firefox

Finally you can force clean rebuild by cleaning up the ~/.cache/podenv directory.

This conclude the tutorial on how to use an application. By this point you should understand how podenv manage the runtime and how update works.