podman-system-connection(1)

podman-system-connection1

Manage the destination(s) for podman service(s)

Usage

podman system connection subcommand

Overview

Manage the destination(s) for Podman service(s).

The user is prompted for the ssh login password or key file passphrase as required. The ssh-agent is supported if it is running.

Podman manages the system connection by writing and reading the podman-connections.json file located under $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/containers or if the env is not set it defaults to $HOME/.config/containers. Or the PODMAN_CONNECTIONS_CONF environment variable can be set to a full file path which podman will use instead. This file is managed by the podman commands and should never be edited by users directly. To manually configure the connections use service_destinations in containers.conf.

If the ReadWrite column in the podman system connection list output is set to true the connection is stored in the podman-connections.json file otherwise it is stored in containers.conf and can therefore not be edited with the podman system connection commands.

Commands

CommandMan PageDescription
addpodman-system-connection-add(1)Record destination for the Podman service
defaultpodman-system-connection-default(1)Set named destination as default for the Podman service
listpodman-system-connection-list(1)List the destination for the Podman service(s)
removepodman-system-connection-remove(1)Delete named destination
renamepodman-system-connection-rename(1)Rename the destination for Podman service

Examples

List system connections:

$ podman system connection list
Name URI                                           Identity	      Default  ReadWrite
devl ssh://[email protected]/run/podman/podman.sock ~/.ssh/id_rsa  true     true

Releases

4 releases since Debian 11 (Bullseye); the text changed 3 times.

  1. 11
  2. 12
  3. 13
  4. Arch

History

June 2020, Originally compiled by Jhon Honce (jhonce at redhat dot com)

From podman 6.1.4-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.