Quadlet

Posted Jul 26, 2022 21:09 UTC (Tue) by tau (subscriber, #79651)
Parent article: Docker and the OCI container ecosystem

Quadlet is another interesting project that aims to bridge Podman with systemd. It is a systemd generator that consumes .container files and produces systemd service units that launch podman. The idea is that you can create a high level systemd-unit-like file for each of your containers that will then get launched as a native systemd unit. This seems like an improvement over podman's own native systemd integration solution, which recommends that users should type in a long command line string that will manually generate a systemd service file.

The quadlet seems to be in danger of ending up stillborn though, there hasn't been much activity in its GitHub repository lately, which is a shame because I was looking forward to using it once its RPM packaging graduates out of Rawhide.

Quadlet

Posted Jul 27, 2022 19:16 UTC (Wed) by rjones (subscriber, #159862) [Link] (2 responses)

One thing that kinda sucks about podman systemd integration, which may not be avoidable, is that the files it generates is can be very specific to the version of systemd you are using. I toyed with the idea that I could just use the podman command to generate templates I could use via ansible or whatnot, but it didn't really work out.

That was a while ago, though. Maybe it's better now.

Quadlet

Posted Jul 27, 2022 20:05 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> I toyed with the idea that I could just use the podman command to generate templates I could use via ansible or whatnot, but it didn't really work out.

`quadlet` mentioned elsewhere in the comments seems like it'd work better. But can't you have Ansible run the generator command as your "sync" rather than expecting specific file contents?

Quadlet

Posted Jul 28, 2022 9:08 UTC (Thu) by valberg (guest, #83862) [Link]

There are plans to integrate Quadlet into the containers/podman project such that they can be released simultaneously. Quadlet and Podman can then also share the generate-systemd logic.

Starting with Podman v4.2 (to be released in early August), you can also use a systemd template to run Kubernetes YAML [1]. That simplifies the workload quite a bit as we only need to feed the YAML file to the template and systemd and Podman will take care of the rest.

[1] https://github.com/containers/podman/blob/main/docs/sourc...