Red Hat Podman Desktop 1.2 Adds Podman 6 Support and Secrets Management
The latest release of Red Hat Podman Desktop introduces Podman 6 integration, a new graphical secrets manager, automated CA certificate syncing, and streamlined in-app updates.
Red Hat build of Podman Desktop 1.2 adds Podman 6 support, a graphical secrets manager, automatic corporate CA certificate syncing, and in-app updates.
Podman 6 introduces a workflow for downloading and updating an existing installation. It brings an improved CLI, new security features, tighter host-to-VM integration, AMD GPU support, and Quadlet improvements, plus bug fixes, upgraded dependencies, and security patches.
The new sidebar Secrets panel lets you create, inspect, and delete local secrets using a name and contents like a password or private key. The New Container pane includes a Secrets section where you select "Add secret mapping" to inject a secret into a new container as an environment variable or a mounted file. Extension authors can use the Podman Desktop API for custom providers supporting the Docker API endpoint.
For SSL-inspecting proxies, the Create Podman machine page adds an enabled-by-default option: "Import host trusted CA certificates into machine during startup." Podman Desktop calls Podman 6 with --import-native-ca to copy host root store keys into the VM trust store.
Version 1.2 checks for new Red Hat release builds in the background, displaying notifications on the dashboard, status line, and native notifications when patches arrive. You can view release highlights, change logs, and security advisories in-app, then upgrade with one click.
Migration from Podman 5.x requires stopping running machines and recreating them. Red Hat lists four steps: stop all running Podman VMs, Windows Hyper-V users run podman machine reset, confirm the first-launch migration prompt to remove outdated 5.x assets, and create a new Podman 6 virtual machine using the guided onboarding wizard.
Red Hat published these details on October 26, 2026.