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Troubleshooting Podman on Windows

You can find here troubleshooting help for issues specific to Windows.

Deleting a corrupted Podman Machine​

Issue​

  1. You are not able to stop your Podman Machine.

    $ podman machine stop

  2. The Logs contain this error:

    Error: Error stopping sysd: exit status 1

Workaround​

  1. To display the active Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution list: in the terminal, run:

    $ wsl --list

  2. The command returns the list of active WSL distributions. Identify your Podman Machine in the list, such as podman-machine-default.

  3. To stop, and uninstall your Podman Machine: in the terminal, replace podman-machine-default by your Podman machine name, and run:

    $ wsl --unregister podman-machine-default

Additional resources​

The terminal session attaches to Podman Desktop when launching it from the command line​

Issue​

  1. When you start Podman Desktop from the command line in Windows the terminal session attaches to it.
  2. When you quit the terminal, it kills Podman Desktop.

Workaround​

  • Set the environment variable ELECTRON_NO_ATTACH_CONSOLE to true before launching Podman Desktop.

When the host is behind a VPN, Podman cannot access network resources​

When the host is behind a VPN, Podman might fail to access network resources, and display errors such as Temporary failure in name resolution.

Solution​

See Accessing resources behind a VPN with Podman on Windows.

Older WSL versions might lead to networking issues​

Older versions of WSL might cause networking issues, such as the Get-NetTCPConnection error, indicating that the WSL loopback forwarding facility is not functioning correctly. Recent versions of WSL do not have this issue Recent WSL versions do not have the issue.

Solution​

  1. Update Windows to either the 21H1, 21H2, or 22H2 version of Windows 10, or to the 21H1 version of Windows 11, or greater.

  2. Update WSL:

    wsl --update

  3. Optionally, delete your Podman machine, and create a new one.