FLAKE-CTL-PODMAN-SHOW(8)

💅 FLAKE-CTL-PODMAN-SHOW — your fave little container peekaboo, bestie

okay so this is the flake-ctl podman show page, and it's genuinely one of the cutest ones — it just... shows you your container instances. that's it. that's the whole vibe. ✨

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🫶 SYNOPSIS

USAGE:
    flake-ctl podman show [OPTIONS]

OPTIONS:
    --format <FORMAT>
    --help

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🌸 DESCRIPTION

Hi bestie 💖 so this command shows the container instances created from flake applications. Like, all of them. In a list. Iconic behaviour honestly.

Here's the tea on how it figures out which setup to read the flake configurations from: it's detected from the caller. So if you run it as any user other than root, it uses that user's own specific rootless setup. no cap.

For each container instance, podman-pilot writes a meta data file named after the flake application. Those files live below /tmp/flakes, in a private directory of the user the instance belongs to — for example /tmp/flakes/1000/myapp.cid. The command reads these files and then combines them with the info from the respective flake configuration file. chef's kiss 🎀

By default the info is rendered as a table with a headline, which is meant to be read by humans (hi, that's you 🌸). But for processing it in scripts and other programs, the machine readable formats json and csv are provided. very much main character energy for your automation pipeline.

Here's literally everything that gets shown for each instance:

• name — the name of the flake application the instance was created from. An instance started with the pilot option @NAME is shown with that name as a suffix ✨
• user — the name of the user the instance belongs to. Instances of other users are only shown if their meta data directory can be read 👀
• id — the container ID as it was written by podman. In the table format the ID is shown abbreviated to its first 12 characters, exactly like podman ps does
• status — running if podman reports the container as running, stopped if it does not. The status is unknown if the container cannot be looked up. That happens for an instance without a flake configuration, and for a rootless instance of another user, because such a container lives in the podman storage of that user 💀
• image — the name of the container the instance was created from
• config — the path of the flake configuration file. The system wide registration is preferred over the registration in the flakes directory of the user the instance belongs to

Anything that can't be read shows up as - in the table format, null in the json format, and as an empty field in the csv format. consistent, we love to see it 🫶

⚠️ quick heads up bestie: a meta data file also exists for an instance which is no longer running. The pilots delete them when they run the flake application again. So that's why this command can also show instances in the stopped status — it's not a bug, it's a feature 💅

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• --format <FORMAT> — format of the output. supported formats are:
  • table: human readable table with a headline. default 🎀
  • json: machine readable list of instance records
  • csv: machine readable comma separated values without a header line
• --help — you know her, you love her, she tells you how to use this thing 🌈

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🦋 FILES

• /tmp/flakes
• /usr/share/flakes
• $HOME/.config/flakes
• /etc/flakes.yml

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🍓 EXAMPLE

$ flake-ctl podman show

$ flake-ctl podman show --format json

that's it. two commands. slay. 🔥

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👑 AUTHOR

Marcus Schäfer 💜

🌸 COPYRIGHT

c. 2026, Marcus Schäfer

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and that's a wrap bestie!! ✨🎀🦋 this little page is from the flake-ctl-podman-show manual, FLAKE-CTL-PODMAN-SHOW(8) — go forth and show responsibly 💅🫶