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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.

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.