Question(s) regarding Quadlet and Podman 4.4.1

[mcdent]

Hi, I'm moving my Podman containers on RHEL 9.2 to the newer Quartet way of doing things.
One reason was to take advantage of being able to update them more easily.
I've managed to get one container working but there are a couple of issues. I'd like to iron these out before I continue with the rest 🤞

1. if you add the Label="io.containers.autoupdate=registry" to the unit file, you need to specify the fully qualified path to the image. It seems no matter what I try, e.g. hub.docker.com/r/louislam/uptime-kuma:latest it does not work.

2. If I forget number 1 for now, remove the Label="io.containers.autoupdate=registry" and set Image=louislam/uptime-kuma:latest I am able to manually start the container from this Quartet file:-

[Unit]
Description=Uptime Kuma
After=local-fs.target

[Container]
Image=louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
#Image=hub.docker.com/r/louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
Volume=/home/mike/docker/uptime-kuma/run/data:/app/data
PublishPort=3001:3001
ContainerName=uptime-kuma
#Label="io.containers.autoupdate=registry"
Exec=

[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

The process I used was:-
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user status mysleep.service
And the service & container start fine. However if I reboot, the service/container does not start.
I've been picking at the following couple of websites for help:-
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/quadlet-podman
https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html

Thanks for any pointers/help!
Mike
🙏

[eriksjolund]

I think you mean Quadlet instead of Quartet

Fully qualified paths for images at Dockerhub start with docker.io/

Try replacing
hub.docker.com/r/louislam/uptime-kuma:latest
with
docker.io/louislam/uptime-kuma:latest

[mcdent]

You are indeed correct! Quadlet :) My bad.
Thanks that has fixed the issue with the Image name.

Any ideas what I have missed which prevents the container starting at boot? Oddly the example I initially tested with from
https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/quadlet-podman , whicih just runs a sleep 1000 seems to start fine.

[Unit]
Description=The sleep container
After=local-fs.target

[Container]
Image=registry.access.redhat.com/ubi9-minimal:latest
Exec=sleep 1000

[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

[eriksjolund]

Maybe you need to run

loginctl enable-linger yourusername

or

sudo loginctl enable-linger yourusername

[mcdent]

Thanks, I already had that set. I have other Podman containers starting at boot and in fact the test one I posted above starts at boot just fine. I'll check the logs after another boot.

[eriksjolund]

I don't know how Quadlet treats empty values.

I see you use

Exec=

Probably it's better to remove that line or to set the value to the command you would like to be run.

[mcdent]

Ok, I actually sorted this and it was an issue on my side.

It appears as I had an 'old' container and service file in ~/.config/systemd/user/ even though it was disabled it appeared to confilct with the new unit file of the same name uptime-kuma.
I tested this first by changing the ContainerName=uptime-kuma to ContainerName=uptimekuma and it started as expected at boot.
I then removed the older service file to stop the errors I was seeing in the journal at boot:-

• systemctl --user disable container-uptime-kuma.service
• systemctl --user stop container-uptime-kuma.service
• rm ~/.config/systemd/user/container-uptime-kuma.service
• systemctl --user daemon-reload

So the moral of this story is to fully remove your old stype container service files before setting up the new Quadlet unit file.