[kh_hk]

I keep reading comments by podman fans asking to drop Docker and yet every time I have tried to use podman it failed on me miserably. IMHO it would be better if podman was not designed and sold as a docker drop in replacement but its own thing.

[exceptione]

That sucks, I never had any problem running a Dockerfile in podman. I don't know what I do differently, but I would as a principle filter out any container that messes with stuff like docker in docker. Podman doesn't need these kind of shenegians.

Also the Docker Compose tool is a well-know exception to the compatibility story. (There is some unofficial podman compose tool, but that is not feature complete and quadlets are better anyway.)

I agree with approaching podman as its own thing though. Yes, you can build a Dockerfile, but buildah lets you build an efficient OCI image from scratch without needing root. For those interested, this document¹ explains how buildah compares to podman and docker.

1. https://github.com/containers/buildah/tree/main/docs/contain...

[Nelkins]

There's a real dearth of blog posts explaining how to use quadlets for the local dev experience, and actually most guides I've seen seem to recommend using podman/Docker compose. Do you use quadlets for local dev and testing?

[3np]

Quadlets aren't what I'd personally use for local dev. They are good for running a local headless persistent service. So I wouldn't use it for your service-under-test but they can be a good fit for supporting dev tools like a local package registry, proxy or VPN gateway.

The docs you need for quadlets are basically here: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...

The one gotcha I can think of not mentioned there is that if you run it as a non-root user and want it to run without logging in as that user, you need to: `sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER`.

If you don't vibe with quadlets, it's equally fine to do a normal systemd .service file with `ExecStart=podman run ...`, which quadlets are just convenience sugar for. I'd start there and then return to quadlets if/when you find that becomes too messy. Don't add new abstraction layers just because you can if they don't help.

If you have a more complex service consisting of multiple containers you want to schedule as a single unit, it's also totally fine to combine systemd and compose by having `ExecStart=podman compose up ...`.

Do you want it to run silently in the background with control over autorestarts and log to system journal? Quadlets/systemd.

Do you want to have multiple containers scheduled together (or just prefer it)? Compose.

Do you want to manually invoke it and have the output in a terminal by default? CLI run or compose.

[kh_hk]

A side-effect of running rootless and daemonless is that containers stop on user log out, and I can't believe how all this is to be expected for a newcomer to parse. Because I thought the whole point of containers in production was for them to keep running when you log out.

Of course, when you think about it, nobody expects a command to just survive logging out, but coming from docker, you still have that expectation. And I wonder, am I supposed to be running this on a tmux like the old days? No, you need to do a bunch of systemd/linger/stuff. So being that we are already in systemd land, you keep searching and end up in quadlets, which are a new-ish thing with (last I checked) bad docs, replacing whatever was used before (which has good docs). Docs, being said, that give k8s ptsd. Quadlet, podlet and pods.

It seems that when podman deviates from docker, it does in the least ergonomic way possible. Or maybe I have been lobotomized by years and years of using docker, or maybe my patience threshold is very low nowadays. But this has been my experience. I felt very stupid when I deployed something and it stopped after 5 minutes. I was ready to use podman, because it worked locally. And then it failed in production. Thanks no.

[tremon]

A side-effect of running rootless and daemonless is that containers stop on user log out

This is not a side effect of running rootless, it's a side effect of running systemd (or rather, systemd-logind).

[exceptione]

  loginctl enable-linger

[kh_hk]

Yes, but I want it to only apply to podman, not any running task.

    systemctl --user enable podman.socket loginctl enable-linger <USER>

?

[exceptione]

You should compare it imho to ssh. If you break your connection, your session is gone. So if you only want certain parts of your session survive, which ones should? Because maybe your container depends on avahi on the host, or cups, or...?

Just a random thought, but if you can create a user on the host that just has the most minimal set of systemd services enabled your container needs, you could apply it to that user.

But still, on a server that wouldn't make much sense imho, as the default user is usually the service user having a minimal set of services enabled. On a desktop, your default user is logged in anyways. So I think this isn't a real problem tbh.

[osigurdson]

I just use Podman's Kubernetes yaml as a compose substitute when running everything locally. This way it is fairly similar to production. Docker compose seems very niche to me now.