Podman container|image exists

By Brent Baude GitHub

We are seeing a proliferation of Podman usage in users' daily workflows. As such, these workflows are often scripted -- in something like bash -- and clear exit codes from the applications being run are paramount. One of the tasks we often see is a user wanting to verify if an image or a container exists in local storage. We saw several different approaches approaches to solving this including running podman ps or podman images with filters or complex uses of grep.

Solution

After a bit of discussion with our users, recorded in [issue #1845] (https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/1845), a plan was hatched to have a specific command that satisfies this use case. It was implemented for both containers and images; and I suppose if users wish, we could implement it for pods as well. If the image or container exists, Podman will return an exit code of 0. If it does not exist, Podman will return an exit code of 1. Any other exit code can be attributed to non-verification failures like permissions or failure in reading local storage.

Check on an images

To verify the existence of an image in your local storage, you can use the command podman image exists <IMAGE_NAME>. Let's clarify through the use of an example.

The images we have in our local storage are as follows:

$ sudo podman images
REPOSITORY                   TAG      IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
docker.io/library/alpine     latest   196d12cf6ab1   2 months ago   4.67 MB

If we wanted to verify the existence of the image docker.io/library/alpine:latest, we would:

$ sudo podman image exists docker.io/library/alpine:latest
$ echo $?
0

You can also verify by short-name if preferable:

$ sudo podman image exists alpine
$ echo $?
0

You can also verify an image by an image's full or shortened ID.

$ sudo podman image exists 196d12cf6ab1
$ echo $?
0

And finally, a failure to verify example would look like:

$ sudo podman image exists busybox
$ echo $?
1

Check on a container

We can verify the existence of a container in much the same way as an image. The grammar differs slightly.

My system has the following container:

$ sudo podman ps --format {% raw %}"{{.ID}} {{.Names}}"{% endraw %}
472fde2f48c7 foobar

And I can verify the existence of the container with podman container exists <CONTAINER_NAME>.

$ sudo podman container exists foobar
$ echo $?
0

Like images, you can also verify a container using its full or partial container ID.