Vouch request: craigamcw

[craigamcw]

What do you want to work on?

I would like to add podman socket detection as a fallback for macOS when Docker Desktop is not available, inside the gateway provisioning path. Docker would remain default, purely adding podman to enable OpenShell podman support to unlock NemoClaw for macOS.

The change would detect macOS and check for $DOCKER_HOST then /var/run/docker.sock, then look for the , $CONTAINER_HOST and podman socket. I also propose to expose a runtime flag for pod man so that podman discovery can be forced explicitly. Podman needs to be running before the sock can exist, I propose to include checks for missing or stopped podman machine to create a clear error.

install.sh would also need to updated also to be podman aware.

I am not looking to make changes to the Linux gateway code, Docker socket path on any platforms, K3s provision logic, policy engine or inference routing.

Why this change?

Nvidia NemoClaw is currently blocked because Openshell doesn't yet support Podman. Openshell needs a Linux VM to run the Linux kernel security modules to get this on macOS Podman can be used and is intended to be the native macOS backend planned by NVIDIA.

We can just use the workaround in issue #260 but it has issues in DNS and host-routing gaps that have not yet been fully resolved. Podman is the intended architecture for NemoClaw and would enable local inference and a clean setup on macOS.

Checklist

• I wrote this request myself (not AI-generated)
• I have read CONTRIBUTING.md

[johntmyers]

/vouch

[github-actions[bot]]

@craigamcw has been vouched by @johntmyers.

You can now submit pull requests to OpenShell. Welcome aboard.

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before submitting.