MQ

(Update: Podman has recently made installing the software on Windows machines much simpler by just downloading a .zip folder or an .msi package or a .tar.gz file. Click here to learn more.)

IBM MQ has been using Docker for a while now to use container technology and store the IBM MQ image in their repository (i.e., Docker Hub). But, as of the 31st of January 2022, Docker has officially changed their product subscription model (read more about it here). Podman is a free alternative to Docker. Although it is missing a few features, when compared to Docker, Podman is still very good and the transition from using Docker to Podman is nearly seamless as most of the commands which work with Docker work with Podman.
But, their installation documentation gets a bit convoluted for Windows, in my opinion (the Mac and Linux installation steps are easy to follow). So, I have compiled all the steps I followed to install Podman on Windows into this single blogpost.

Note: This works only on Windows PC’s and will not work on Windows VM’s.

1. Enable WSL and Virtualisation by doing the following: Search for ‘Turn Windows features on or off’. Select/enable ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux’ and ‘Virtual Machine Platform’ and press OK after which select ‘Restart Now’, which will reboot your PC.
2. After your PC has finished rebooting, download and run the latest Linux kernel update package from here.
3. Proceed to open a new terminal (Command Prompt or Powershell) as Administrator and set the default version of WSL to 2 using the following command: wsl.exe --set-default-version 2
4. Navigate to the Microsoft store and install the Ubuntu App.
5. Once this is complete, launch the Ubuntu app. This will open an Ubuntu terminal and you will be required to create a new username and password.
6. After this, you will be shown details about Ubuntu including the Ubuntu version installed (you can also input the following command to show the version: lsb_release -a). Keep the version number in mind as it will be required for the next step.
7. On my setup, I used Ubuntu Version 20.04 (replace the version number in the commands below if your Ubuntu version is different). So, on the Ubuntu terminal, I ran the following commands:

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_20.04/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list

curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable/xUbuntu_20.04/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/devel_kubic_libcontainers_stable.gpg > /dev/null

sudo apt update

sudo apt install podman

This should install Podman on your local machine.

To check if Podman has installed successfully, run the following command: podman info which should, ideally, give you no errors and display information about your system and Podman.