Using Podman Desktop

November 14, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Dangerzone uses the system-installed Podman on Linux, and embeds Podman on Windows on macOS.

If you wish to use a Podman Desktop with a specific configuration, follow these steps. These instructions might work for other custom runtimes, but bear in mind that only Podman is currently supported.

On macOS

To set the container runtime to Podman Desktop, use this command:

/Applications/Dangerzone.app/Contents/MacOS/dangerzone-cli --set-container-runtime /opt/podman/bin/podman

To revert back to the default behavior, pass the default value:

/Applications/Dangerzone.app/Contents/MacOS/dangerzone-cli --set-container-runtime default

On Windows

To set the container runtime to Podman desktop, use this command:

C:\"Program Files"\Dangerzone\dangerzone-cli.exe --set-container-runtime \path\to\your\runtime

To revert back to the default behavior, pass the default value:

C:\"Program Files"\Dangerzone\dangerzone-cli.exe --set-container-runtime podman

FAQ

I've encountered the following error: Error: nomap is only supported in rootless mode

This means that Podman does not run in rootless mode. You can switch to rootless mode with these steps:

podman machine stop
podman machine set --rootful=false
podman machine start