claude-podman

Claude for the security-conscious: run claude-code, the claude cli tool, in a rootless podman container.

Installation

First, download and install podman. Installation is easy and secure with curl

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/EvanCarroll/claude-podman/refs/heads/main/bin/claude |
  sudo tee /usr/local/bin/claude-podman
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/claude-podman

Now you can just run claude-podman.

Benefits

This provides the following benefits:

• Claude only gets file access to
  • Files in the present working directory
  • $HOME/.claude.json
  • $HOME/.claude
• Claude can only execute the files that exist in the image.

This image runs in rootless podman, and even inside rootless podman it runs as a non-root user inside the container. Claude code is maximally locked down and can't even update itself!

Customizing the runtime

Need to add packages to the container, or run an init script? no problem

--apk-packages foo,bar,baz # adds packages foo, bar, baz, with apk
--init-script  ./foobar.sh # copies foobar.sh into the container and executes it as root

For example, let's say you're using kubernetes and you do want claude to be able to troubleshoot it.

claude-podman \
	--apk-packages kubectl \
	--podman-arg "-v $HOME/.kube/config:/home/claude/.kube/config"