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Podman Quadlets with Podman Desktop

(podman-desktop.io)
180 points teleforce | 3 comments | 14 Apr 25 17:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.637s | source
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orthoxerox ◴[14 Apr 25 20:20 UTC] No.43685880[source]▶
What is the killer feature that will make me want to switch from Docker Compose to Podman Quadlets?
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dharmab ◴[14 Apr 25 20:32 UTC] No.43685989[source]▶
I prefer quadlet for 2 reasons:

1. Podman is simpler than Docker. There is no long-running daemon. Rootless is default.

2. Quadlets can be managed as systemd services, giving me the same tools to manage and view logs for system daemons and containers.

Quadlets have been especially nice for bundling up an AI app I wrote as a cloud-init file, making it easy to deploy the hardware, software and models as one artifact.

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pydry ◴[14 Apr 25 21:46 UTC] No.43686670[source]▶
quadlets == systemd which requires root to run. this is NOT the same thing as "systemd cant run non root containers". OBVIOUSLY it can, just as docker can run non root containers.

Making systemd a necessary dependency to run > 1 container kinda negates many of the the nice advantages that podman has of not requiring root.

podman compose doesnt require root and would serve as a substitute but it's a very neglected piece of software.

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zacwest ◴[14 Apr 25 22:12 UTC] No.43686855[source]▶
You can do non-root systemd units, including Quadlets. See <https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...> under "Podman rootless unit search path."
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1. znhll ◴[14 Apr 25 22:31 UTC] No.43687008[source]▶
I recently started making the switch from docker (and docker compose) to using podman and quadlet, but holy crap is the documentation for podman quadlets a big f-you wall-of-text mandoc that would make Torvalds proud. I've read thru that and am still not quite sure of how to get from point A to point B.

To replace a single docker compose file, sounds like one needs to manually create a number of .container, .volume, .network, .kube files correctly so systemd can spin up a container pod? Is that what I'm reading? Is there nothing that can generate that from a docker-compose.yml?

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2. zacwest ◴[14 Apr 25 22:34 UTC] No.43687031[source]▶
I've used Podlet <https://github.com/containers/podlet> somewhat successfully for this.
3. worewood ◴[15 Apr 25 11:46 UTC] No.43691422[source]▶
I agree. That documentation really needs some love. But if you see the discussions on github issues about quadlet features a common theme is maintainers dismissing requests because "that shouldn't be done in production" or "that won't scale". It seems they can't wrap their head around people wanting to do simple things or someone doing things by themselves at home and not for work at a big company or corporation, and that reflects on that documentation.

Working for one myself, which does have a support contract wit Red Hat, I kinda get where they're coming from--if they make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot, dumb people shoot themselves in the foot in production and they have to fix the mess later. But for that they could have a sanctioned build for clients and a community build for everybody else, just like they have Fedora and RHEL.