Podman

Install

Fedora

sudo dnf install podman

Rootless

I like to use podman rootless, to further contain and separate containers.

Reload the daemon

As Quadlet files are systemd service files, you need to reload the daemon.

systemctl --user daemon-reload

This generates appropriate .service files.

Tip

Sometimes, this can fail and not generate a .service file. To debug this, immediately drop into the user journal, to see any error messages

systemctl --user daemon-reload --no-block; journalctl --user -f

Enable the service

systemctl --user enable name.service

Start the service

systemctl --user start name.service

Check the status

You can check the status of Podman using

podman ps

and the status of the service itself using either

systemctl --user status name.service

or

journalctl --user -xeu name.service

Tip

Sometimes, the non-service-specific journal can be helpful in debugging a problem. In that case, simply restart the service and immediately drop into the journal:

systemctl --user restart name.service --no-block; journalctl --user -f

Keep it running

As a rootless setup doesn’t use a system-level service, all services would be stopped upon logout.

To prevent this, we must enable-linger (where user is your username, of course):

loginctl enable-linger user

Auto-Update

If you enabled the auto-update feature using the AutoUpdate key in the .container file, you still need to enable the auto-update timer

systemctl --user enable --now podman-auto-update.timer