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by zacwest 427 days ago
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."
2 comments

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?

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.

I've used Podlet <https://github.com/containers/podlet> somewhat successfully for this.
you can run docker containers without them requiring root too.

systemd itself is a root service. it shouldnt be a necessary dependency to run > 1 containers without root. somehow it is.