I have a RPi 2 that’s more than enough for my home server needs and I’ve tried to migrate from docker to podman, it simply failed miserably with weird errors, on my laptop everything worked fine, so maybe that’s an issue with Arch ARM or the 32-bit version of it, but really, I wish they could abstract away quadlet, service files generation and so on.

What is the killer feature that will make me want to switch from Docker Compose to Podman Quadlets?

I started looking into podman quadlets on the weekend. All because docker & nft (nftables firewall) don't play nice together.

I have my finely crafted nftables ruleset that I want to keep. Docker is going to abuse the crap out of my ruleset/make me jump through extra hoops to have it work.

Having the containers operate under systemd looks fine (ignoring the fact that it is systemd, I guess I have finally accepted systemd is here to stay).

I was interested in using traefik & docker labelling to have ingress sorted out and I believe this will all play nicely enough to replace docker-compose on a single server.

Quadlets came up recently:

Quadlet: Running Podman containers under systemd (mo8it.com) | 298 points | 68 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43456934

Where do quadlets fit in the container management landscape?

Running individual services that would have been RPMs? Docker compose? K8s?

This made me remember Fleet[0], which I used in the past on CoreOS. It was a very good abstraction for my simple cluster. It felt as robust as a managed cloud service. It's a shame it didn't catch on (and also what happened to CoreOS).

[0] https://github.com/coreos/fleet

Some help in case you got lost in the terminolgy as I did :

Containers: Encapsulate application and its environment

Pods: Group one or more containers in Kubernetes

Kubernetes: Orchestrates containers across clusters.

Quadlets: Declarative container management with Podman and systemd

Podlet: Tool to generate Quadlet file from existing podman configuration

I have been trying to use podman with docker containers to avoid the docker license fee, yet to no avail. Wish there was a tutorial. The docker desktop is a nice interface to interact with containers and podman did not have that last time I checked.

edit: Looks like it changed quite a lot. this looks so much nicer

edit2: I still need a tutorial. had so many errors come up. :(

Is this essentially a compose file in systemd format? Or is there some other complexity that I’m missing

Can I use podman desktop to manage my quadlets on a server over ssh? That would be awesome.

Thanks for sharing this. For some reason I haven't heard of Podman Quadlets until this post. I can think of a few places where Quadlets would work better than Kubernetes or Compose. I'll give them a tinker.