I have never used podman on Debian before, and I will be adopting it for handling my blog's Python environment necessary for the Pelican site generator that it uses.
Install podman
For the installation process, I referred to the Debian Wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/Podman
This command will install podman and its dependencies:
su -c 'apt-get install podman crun'
Configuration
Specify registries for unqualified searches
From the Debian Wiki: A registry is a site you download container images from, similar to how a Debian repository is a site you download .deb packages from. However, whereas apt searches all Debian repositories, podman expects you to qualify which registry you want to search.
# No qualifier - returns nothing:
podman search podman
# Registry qualifier - returns several matches:
podman search quay.io/podman
To make unqualified searches useful, you need to set a list of unqualified-search registries. To set your unqualified-search registries, add a line like unqualified-search-registries=["docker.io", "quay.io"] in either $HOME/.config/containers/registries.conf or /etc/containers/registries.conf.
With these simple changes, I'm now able to build Podman images from Containerfiles (or Dockerfiles).