Windows development environment with podman and git

Introduction

I will share how I have setup my windows machine for development. I’m using Podman, a lightweight container engine for most of my coding.

Prerequisites

• Windows 10 or 11 with WSL 2 enabled
• Administrator privileges

Tools

• Chocolatey (program manager (optional)) - u can install the apps manually
• Visual Studio Code
• Podman
• Git
• GnuPG (optional)
• Keybase (optional)

Installation

1. Chocolatey

• open a PowerShell windows as administrator

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope CurrentUser -Force
iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

2. Visual Studio Code

• install vscode or other editor, but vscode is recommended for devcontainers.
• install gsudo as sudo replacament for windows

choco install vscode gsudo -y

3. Native (optional)

• for languages that might be better to run natively just install them

choco install golang -y

3. Podman

• Reference: https://lukeintheclouds.com/posts/run-devcontainers-without-docker-on-windows11/
• first enable windows subsystem for linux

wsl --install --no-distribution

• Follow any on-screen instructions for rebooting if prompted.

• install podman

• you can skip podman desktop if you don’t need docker-compose or don’t want a GUI for podman.

choco install podman-cli podman-desktop -y
podman machine init
podman machine set --rootful
podman machine start

• To setup docker compose open podman desktop and Enable extensions: podman, compose then Settings -> Resources -> Compose -> setup

4. Devcontainers

1. If you’re using Visual Studio Code for development, consider installing the “Remote Containers” extension:
   • Open VS Code and go to Extensions (Ctrl+Shift+X).
   • Search for “Remote Containers” and install the extension by Microsoft.

Configuring VS Code for Podman

Set these 2 vscode settings.

"dev.containers.dockerPath": "podman"
"dev.containers.mountWaylandSocket": false

Warning: Some things may behave weird unless u use WSL file storage or open the project via Dev Containers: Clone repository into named volume.

5. GPG Signing(Optional)

• Install GnuPG and Keybase
• Setup the keys

choco install gnupg keybase -y
# login
keybase login

# setup key
keybase pgp export --outfile keybase-public.key
keybase pgp export --secret --outfile keybase-private.key

gpg --allow-secret-key-import --import keybase-private.key
gpg --import keybase-public.key

# edit key --> trust -> 5 -> save
gpg --edit-key <email>
del keybase-private.key keybase-public.key 

6. Git configuration

choco install git -y

## Basic config
git config --global user.email <email>
git config --global user.name <name>

## Setting up commit signing (Needs gpg setup first!)
gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long
# id the part after the slash eg: rsa4096/id
git config --global user.signingkey <Key ID>
git config --global commit.gpgsign true

# Sanity check
git config --global -l