podman provides an integrated auto-update mechanism, which I recently applied to all of my containers running on feldspaten. The mechanism is nice, but at first appears a bit counter-intuitive. In this post ’m trying to explain how you can use the mechanism and what to watch out for. I’ll start with the trap I think most people fall for. auto-update is natural but not intuitive Most people’s path to containers starts with docker, which by itself is an amazing tool.
  • Yuu Yin
    2•1 year ago

    The consequence of Docker Compose is that most people use podman containers the same way as they use docker containers. You first create the container, and then you figure a way out, how to restart the container on every reboot. And this approach does not work with podman auto-update, because it requires this process to be upside-down … Wait upside-down? … What do I mean with that?

    The canonical way of starting podman containers at boottime is the creation of custom systemd units for them. This is cool and allows to have daemonless, independent containers running. podman itself provides a handy way of creating those system units, e.g. here for a new nginx container:

    interesting… as far as i remember podman official docs say nothing about that; or at least i do not remember seeing anything. so i ended up using compose with the unofficial podman-compose, which ended up being very frustrating.

    so i thought it was primarily meant for OpenShift instead.

    maybe i’ll give podman another try now that i’m aware of that systemd integation.

  • TopHat
    1•10 months ago

    Now I honestly didn’t know auto-updating podman containers is possible. Makes maintenance a hell lot easier, for non-production systems. Thanks for sharing the article!