I’m afraid this is going to attract the “why use podman when docker exists”-folks, so let me put this under the supposition that you’re already sold on (considering) using podman for whatever reason. (For me, it has been the existence of pods, to be used in situations where pods make sense, but in a non-redundant, single-node setup.)
Now, I was trying to understand the purpose of quadlets and, frankly, I don’t get it. It seems to me that as soon as I want a pod with more than one container, what I’ll be writing is effectively a kubernetes configuration plus some systemd unit-like file, whereas with podman compose I just have the (arguably) simpler compose file and a systemd file (which works for all pod setups).
I would get that it’s sort of simpler, more streamlined and possibly more stable using quadlets to let systemd manage single containers instead of putting podman run commands in systemd service files. Is that all there is to it, or do people utilise quadlets as a kind of lightweight almost-kubernetes distro which leverages systemd in a supposedly reasonable way? (Why would you want to do that if lightweight, fully compliant kubernetes distros are a thing, nowadays?)
Am I missing or misunderstanding something?
Awesome, so, essentially, you create a name.pod file like so:
[Unit] Description=Pod Description [Pod] # stuff like PublishPort or networkingand join every container into the pod through the following line in the .container files:
Pod=name.podand I presume this all gets started via
systemctl --user start name.serviceand systemd/podman figures out somehow which containers will have to be created and joined into the pod, or do they all have to be started individually?(Either way, I find the documentation of this feature lacking. When I tested this stuff myself, I’ll look into improving it.)