Running Selenoid in combination with Docker in Podman

Question

I am working on a MacBook Pro and my company isn't allowing me to install the Docker Desktop application. Since the Docker CLI isn't available separately for macOS I had to install it via Podman.

I also have a Selenium application where I'm using the Selenide framework to write my tests and my colleague (who is using a Linux machine) set up Selenoid to run the tests in.

Now I want to get Selenoid working on my machine as well, but it seems I'm unable to do so. Does anyone have experience in trying to get Selenoid working together with a Docker installed inside Podman?

I already set the DOCKER_HOST environment variable to the location of the podman.sock on my machine, so I'm able to run docker commands in my terminal as you would when it was only Docker that was installed (like docker ps and such).

When trying to run my tests with Selenoid I'm constantly getting this error:

2023-10-31 11:47:11,140 ERROR [main] b.o.LoggingListener [LoggingListener.java:119] org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: Could not start a new session. Response code 500. Message: create container: Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running? 

This is making me think that the tests aren't really using the Podman installation, but they are looking for a Docker installation, which I don't have.

Any advice?

Thank you!

Answer 1

We never tested Selenoid with Podman, however Selenoid also supports DOCKER_HOST environment variable syntax, so try to set exactly the same value of this variable for docker run command via -e flag.