Improving Podman users experience: docker-in-docker

[l0rd]

Hi 👋, I am Mario, and I am a Podman maintainer.

Kudos to the team for the Dev Containers extension 🚀. It's a great project, and we look forward to collaborating to improve Podman users' UX.

For this reason, I would like to suggest a solution to run commands that require docker-in-docker, such as “Dev Containers: Try a Dev Container Sample” and “Dev Containers: Clone Repository in Container Volume…” with Podman.

Podman can currently do docker-in-docker, but requires an extra flag (--security-opt label=disable) compared to Docker:

# Fail
podman run -t --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker:latest docker ps
# Work
podman run --security-opt label=disable -t --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker:latest docker ps

Docker doesn’t mind because --security-opt label=disable is the default:

# Work
docker run -t --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker docker:latest ps
# Work
docker run --security-opt label=disable -t --rm -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock docker:latest docker ps

To address the docker-in-docker problem for Podman, without affecting Docker, you could specify --security-opt label=disable every time you mount the /var/run/docker.sock in a container. Is it something that you can change?

---

• VSCode Version: 1.96.4
• Local OS Version: macOS 15.3
• Remote OS Version: Fedora 41
• Remote Extension/Connection Type: Dev Containers
• Logs:

[2025-02-14T17:03:59.108Z] Start: Run in container: docker volume ls -q
[2025-02-14T17:03:59.214Z] Stop (106 ms): Run in container: docker volume ls -q
[2025-02-14T17:03:59.215Z] Start: Run: /Users/mloriedo/Git/podman/bin/darwin/podman rm -f c7f217518982d6099a73972e0ba2b8647f739f8577cecace95f8dcf716765839
[2025-02-14T17:03:59.218Z] Command failed: docker volume ls -q
[2025-02-14T17:03:59.218Z] permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Get "http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.45/volumes": dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied
[2025-02-14T17:03:59.218Z] Exit code 1
[2025-02-14T17:04:09.150Z] Start: Run: /Users/mloriedo/Git/podman/bin/darwin/podman volume ls -q
[2025-02-14T17:04:09.254Z] Stop (104 ms): Run: /Users/mloriedo/Git/podman/bin/darwin/podman volume ls -q

---

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Configure Dev Containers extension to use podman as described in doc
2. Open the command palette and select Dev Containers: Try a Dev Container Sample and select one of the samples

Does this issue occur when you try this locally?: No
Does this issue occur when you try this locally and all extensions are disabled?: No

[chrmarti]

Hi Mario, thanks for investigating, this makes sense!