I faced the following issue while trying to pull docker image present in the docker hub in podman using the following command. 

docker pull nginx:stable

The error I received was

Error: short-name "nginx:stable" did not resolve to an alias and no unqualified-search registries are defined in "/etc/containers/registries.conf"

Initially I assumed something was broken, but it’s not.

This error is actually a deliberate security feature and understanding it will make you better at working with containers.

We have two ways to solve this.

Option 1: Use fully qualified name of the image including the registry name.

The solution is to use fully qualified name instead of short name. That means instead of using “nginx:stable”, we need to make it as “docker.io/nginx:stable”.

docker pull docker.io/nginx:stable

Option 2: Add external registries to the podman configuration

Edit the following config file and make an entry into the unqualified-search-registries = []

/etc/containers/registries.conf

Add the following entry into the file.

unqualified-search-registries = ["docker.io"]