Temporary Containers

Temporary containers are created on the fly before a containerized application is run. When the application terminates, the container is automatically deleted.

As an example, let's say you have come across this great containerized application hub.docker.com/r/rancher/cowsay.

You'll want to run it in a temporary container by using the --rm option of Podman as such:

podman run --rm -it docker.io/rancher/cowsay moo moo mooooooo

For most containerized applications, there is little reason to persist and/or name the container and then have to worry about deleting it later.

A more realistic scenario is one used by the author of this guide. He wrote the following bash script named mkdocs available in his host environment to run Material for MkDocs:

#!/usr/bin/bash
podman run --rm -v .:/docs --network host docker.io/squidfunk/mkdocs-material "$@"

With the -v .:/docs option, the current working directory becomes available inside the container. Thus, the author can perform the following to work on a document saved under ~/src/mydoc:

cd ~/src/mydoc
mkdocs --help
mkdocs serve

For a discussion of the many different ways containers can be used, visit Fedora Container Docs.