I am moving from docker to podman and selinux because I thought that podman is more secure and hence, the future. I thought the transition will be somewhat seamless. I even prepaired containers but once I migrated I still ran into issues.
minor issue: it’s podman-compose instead of podman compose. The hyphen feels like a step back because we moved from docker-compose to docker compose. But thT’s not a real issue.
podman does not autostart containers after boot. You have to manually start them, or write a start script. Or create a systemd unit for each of them.
Spinning up fresh services works most of the time but using old services that worked great with docker are a pain. I am wasting minutes after minutes because I struggle with permissions and other weird issues.
podman can’t use lower number ports such that you have to map the ports outside of the machine and forward them properly.
Documentation and tutorials are “all” for docker. Github issues are “all” for docker. There isn’t a lot of information floating around.
I’m still not done and I really wonder why I should move forward and not go back to docker. Painful experience so far.
FWIW, I’m on Bluefin-dx (one of uBlue[1]'s images) and I’ve noticed that my containers autostart at boot since I’ve rebased from Silverblue to Bluefin-dx. Mind you; I’m not necessarily advocating for you to make the switch to Bluefin-dx, but it’s at least worth finding out how they’ve been able to achieve that and perhaps implement their ways for your own benefit.
We use quadlets to manage those containers: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html
As others in the thread have pointed out just having systemd manage them is the way to go, it’s a nice combo!
Thank you Jorge for chiming in!
I am on Silverblue, run on boot is easy if you run containers via systemd, if service is enabled it auto-starts on boot, if disabled, than you start it manually.
TIL, thank you for that insight!
That’s the peculiar part; some of the containers I’ve had since I was on Silverblue, but back then they never autostarted on boot. Just (relatively) recently, since the rebase to Bluefin-dx, have I experienced that all of the containers -so even the ones that existed prior- autostart on boot.
Could be podman-restart maybe…
systemctl --user enable podman-restart.service
Or linger to force containers run even if you switch to other user or lock out
loginctl enable-linger