Hacker News Reader

Comment by spockz | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to use quadlets and tried podlets as well since I wanted to try staying close to the RH paradigm. The experience coming from docker compose (on top of podman) was horrendous. It became a rabbit hole of trying with different flags, upgrading versions, following suggestions from podlet itself to switch to another tool, etc.

Ultimately my systemd just executes `podman compose up`.

What are the benefits of quadlets as opposed to letting compose do its job?

Update: podman runs under my user, no demon whatsoever.

View on HN

Not sure I follow; you don't need to use podlet at all unless you're migrating from existing compose files and want some help. I don't use it outside of a few one-offs. If you're referring to "pods" as in the kubernetes-style container orchestration, than you don't have to use those either. Did you happen to try this on Ubuntu/Debian? Both distros tend to have very old versions of Podman in the repos. TBH podman was not worth using before 4.2 or so, no matter what Red Hat said. I'm not sure I'm following your situation/ use-case though.

If you're already running podman containers as systemd units, then the main benefit would probably be better systemd integration and without having to write separate compose files. If you're fine with the latter than A) you're the only person I've met who's happy with podman compose and B) you probably won't gain that much from switching to quadlets. Out of curiosity, does systemd spinning up podman-compose still properly keep the resulting container processes in the same cgroup? If not, that would be a decent benefit to swapping to quadlets.

I tried this in Fedora 38 or 39 if memory serves.

I am coming from docker files which give me a concise view of what services I’m configuring and how. The process of converting these tools into a (bunch of?) quadlets is where I got stuck.

As far as I could see at the time all containers in one compose file ended up in the same cgroup.

I’m not using podman compose but docker compose over the socket created by podman.

It integrates naturally into my desktop environment.

I drop a .container file into ~/.config/containers/systemd/ and the rest is taken care of. I use yadm to manage my dot files and that way it ends up on all the systems I want it.

Never tried podlet, though. I just write the container file directly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com