How to start a network quadlet at system boot?

[ChrisHills463]

I would like to create podman networks at boot but so far I have been unsuccessful. I have created a quadlet which systemd recognizes and is able to start, but I cannot "enable" it with systemctl. The error displayed is Failed to enable unit: Unit /run/systemd/generator/traefik-network.service is transient or generated. This is what I have tried so far:-

sudo tee /etc/containers/systemd/traefik.network >/dev/null <<EOF
[Unit]
Description=Podman network traefik

[Network]
Driver=bridge
NetworkName=traefik

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
EOF

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl start traefik-network.service

sudo systemctl enable traefik-network.service 
# Failed to enable unit: Unit /run/systemd/generator/traefik-network.service is transient or generated.

I would appreciate any help!

[Luap99]

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.unit.5.html#enabling-unit-files

In general there should not be a need to enable the network units as the container unit should pull it in its dependencies automatically

[ChrisHills463]

Will this work for networks defined as external in the container?

[Luap99]

I don't understand this question, what do you mean by external?

[ChrisHills463]

In podman-compose.yml:-

networks:
  traefik:
    external: true

This is because I have a collection of containers that need to communicate but are not part of the same application, and I need to be able to manage each container independently (e.g. restarting/upgrading without affecting the others).