Podman Codebase structure

Description about important directories in our repository.

bin/

• Build binaries are put here, podman, podman-remote, quadlet, etc...

cmd/

• Each directory here builds its own binary.

cmd/podman/

• Podman CLI code, CLI commands and flags are defined here, we are using the Cobra CLI library for command line parsing.

cmd/quadlet/

• Quadlet CLI code.

contrib/

• CI scripts, packaging files some container image build files.

docs/

• Sphinx based documentation for Podman that is build on Read the Docs and hosted at docs.podman.io.
• More information is found in README.md.

libpod/ (only works on linux and freebsd)

• Underlying core for most Podman operations, defines container, pod, volume management operations.
• Contains the database to store these information on disk, either Sqlite or Botldb (our old db format).
• Integrates with our other libraries such as:
  • containers/storage to create and mount container storage.
  • containers/buildah for building images.
  • containers/common/libnetwork for network management.

pkg/

• Various packages to do all sorts of different things.

pkg/api/

• The HTTP REST API server code.

pkg/bindings/

• The HTTP REST API client code.
• This package must have a stable API as it is for use by external consumers as well.

pkg/domain/

• "glue" code between cli and the actual operations performed.

pkg/domain/entities/

• The package defines two interfaces (ContainerEngine, ImageEngine) that more or less have a function for each cli command defined.
• It also defines a lot of types (structs) for the various options the functions accept.

pkg/domain/infra/tunnel/

• Implements the two interfaces for the remote mode (podman-remote) which just maps each operations to the bindings code from pkg/bindings which then talks to the remote server.

pkg/domain/infra/abi/

• Implements the two interfaces for the local mode (podman) that calls then directly into the core parts of libpod/ or our other libraries containers/{common,image,storage}...

pkg/libartifact/

• Core code for the new podman artifact commands.

pkg/machine/

• Core code for podman machine commands.

pkg/machine/e2e/

• e2e tests for podman machine commands.
• Runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

test/

• Various tests suites, see the test README.md for more details.
• These run on linux only.

vendor/

• Directory created with "go mod vendor".
• This includes all go deps in our repo, DO NOT edit this directory directly, changes in dependencies must be made in their respective upstream repositories and then updated in go.mod.