Podman Migration Check — Docker Desktop ties

Finds the lines in your compose.yaml, Dockerfile, devcontainer.json, CI workflows and shell scripts that only work while Docker Desktop is installed, and prints the Podman replacement next to each one.

Tool page: https://getreadystack.com/tools/podman-migration-check

Yardstick: Docker Desktop needs a paid subscription once an organisation has more than 250 employees or more than $10 million in annual revenue; Docker Business is $24 per user per month, billed annually ($288 per developer a year).

Why these lines matter

Teams that move from Docker Desktop to Podman usually keep their compose files, dev containers and CI scripts. Most of those files run unchanged. A few lines do not, because they depend on something Docker Desktop injects: the /var/run/docker.sock host socket, the host.docker.internal / kubernetes.docker.internal DNS names, the desktop-linux and docker-desktop contexts, the docker-credential-desktop helper, and CLI plugins such as docker scout. Rootless Podman also refuses host ports below 1024 and treats unqualified image names differently. These lines fail on the day Docker Desktop is uninstalled, usually in CI first.

Six Docker Desktop ties found before Podman — the bundled example

The dirty example is a 17-line compose.yaml. The check returns 6 findings on 6 lines (3 errors, 3 warnings):

The fixed file returns 0 findings.

The 10 rules

Each finding carries the rule's source link in ext/rules.json.

Use

Open any compose, Dockerfile, Containerfile, devcontainer.json, workflow YAML, Makefile or .sh file. Findings appear in the Problems panel as you type. Run Podman Migration Check: Check current file from the command palette to re-run.

Free and full version

Free: the full check of the open file, every rule, with the fix text. Nothing is capped.

Full version ($29 once, one licence key per person or team seat): scan every repo in the workspace in one pass and export a Markdown migration report per repo for the licence decision — get a key.

Limits

The check reads text line by line. It does not start containers and does not know which Podman version you run; host.docker.internal is a warning because newer Podman releases may add the alias. Comment lines are skipped.