Tag Archives: containers

create podman services with podman-compose

Podman is a fork of Docker that Redhat is using. I really liked docker-compose functionality; fortunately there is a podman-compose project which is more or less the same thing.

I now have a setup where each podman container is controlled by a systemd service, set to run on startup, with version controlled podman-compose files.

First, I installed podman-compose:

sudo curl -o /usr/local/bin/podman-compose https://raw.githubusercontent.com/containers/podman-compose/devel/podman_compose.py
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podman-compose

I then created podman-compose files (syntax identical to docker-compose) for each container. Here is one example (jackett.yml)

---
version: "2"
services:
  jackett:
    image: linuxserver/jackett
    container_name: jackett
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=America/Boise
    volumes:
      - /mnt/storage/Docker/Jackett/config:/config
      - /mnt/storage/Docker/Jackett/downloads:/downloads
    ports:
      - 9117:9117
    restart: unless-stopped

I then created a corresponding systemd unit file for each container:

#/etc/systemd/system/jackett.service
[Unit]
Description=Jackett
After=network.target

[Service]
Restart=always

# Compose up
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/podman-compose -f /home/nicholas/podman/jackett.yml up

# Compose down, remove containers and volumes
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/podman-compose -f /home/nicholas/podman/jackett.yml down -v

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I then do a systemctl daemon-reload, and enable the service for startup:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable jackett

Success.

Why not create a single podman-compose file for all my services, instead of creating individual services for each container? I wanted to be able to clearly see log output for each container with journalctl -f -u <service name.> If you lump all your services in a single compose file, the output from each container gets all jumbled into that single service log. Separating out each container into its own service was more clean.

Podman no internet in container fix

I’ve started experimenting with CentOS 8 & Podman (a fork of Docker.) I ran into an issue where one of my containers needed internet access, but could not connect. After some digging I found this site which explains why:

I had to configure the firewall on the podman host to allow for IP masquerade:

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-masquerade --permanent

After running the above command, my container had internet access!