Using Makefiles to build switching between Podman and Docker automatically

#devops #productivity #kubernetes #cloudops

I use a Makefile with most of my projects, and the ones that are packaged as containers, this usually consists of a step like:

docker build -t me/my-project:some-tag

but I recently began using a system that uses Podman by default, so I could alias podman to docker, but more properly, I just updated my Makefile with the following to make the build step conditional and more flexible between hosts:

ifeq ($(shell command -v podman 2> /dev/null),)
    CMD=docker
else
    CMD=podman
endif
...
build-image:
    $(CMD) build -t jmarhee/scrivener:$(TAG) . --no-cache
...
quick-launch:
    x11docker --backend=$(CMD) jmarhee/scrivener

where in the above example, it detects not only that I'm running podman, but also updates other configurations that rely on the container runtime as well (in this case, launching a GUI application from the container)