How I Run Containers in My Homelab

I’ve been running containers on FreeBSD for a while now, and I’ve settled into a workflow that just works. Here’s how I manage everything. The Stack Component Choice Host OS FreeBSD 15 Runtime Podman + ocijail Orchestration Ansible Images Daemonless (FreeBSD-native) Storage ZFS (lz4 compression) Networking VNET jails + bridge No Docker daemon. No Linux VMs. Podman talks to ocijail, which runs containers as native FreeBSD jails. Directory Structure Every service gets its config stored in /containers/<service>/. Simple and predictable: ...

January 20, 2026 · 6 min · Michael Johnson