[diggan]

> So what’s the ideal setup when using podman? Use compose anyway and hope it won’t be deprecated, or use SystemD as Podman suggests as a replacement for Compose?

After moving from bare to compose to docker-compose to podman-compose and bunch of things in-between (homegrown Clojure config-evaluators, ansible, terraform, make/just, a bunch more), I finally settled on using Nix for managing containers.

It's basically the same as docker-compose except you get to do it with proper code (although Nix :/ ) and as a extra benefit, get to avoid YAML.

You can switch the backend/use multiple ones as well, and relatively easy to configure as long as you can survive learning the basics of the language: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Docker

[0xCMP]

Of course, that means you need to run NixOS for that to work (which I also do everywhere) and there are networking problems with Docker/Podman in NixOS you need to address yourself. Whereas Docker "runs anywhere" these days.

Worth noting the tradeoffs, but I agree using Nix for this makes life more pleasant and easy to maintain.

[diggan]

> that means you need to run NixOS for that to work

Does it? I'm pretty sure you're able to run Nix (the package manager) on Arch Linux for example, I'm also pretty sure you can do that on things like macOS too but that I haven't tested myself.

Or maybe something regarding this has changed recently?

[0xCMP]

sorry, yes to build it is fine, but managing them with Nix (e.g. dealing with which ports to expose and etc like in the article) requires NixOS.

edit: I actually never checked, but I guess nothing stops home-manager or nix-darwin from working too, but I don't think either supports running containers by default. EOD all NixOS does is make a systemd service which runs `docker run ..` for you.

[libeclipse]

You don't need NixOS to use Nix as a package manager/build system

[brnt]

If you configure your server(s) through nix and nix containers, then even without another host OS you are basically running nix.