[Quadlet] How to start containers in a pod without starting the pod

[witchent]

Hello everyone,

I tried googling this problem but either I am doing something wrong or nobody else has this problem:
I have a classic situation of a few different containers needing to communicate together, lets call them db and web.
As I also want to be able to start and stop both containers together, I created a pod, lets call it sum.
Now I want to be able to backup the database before any writing from web. I used to just start the db container, do the backup, then start the whole file (using docker-compose this was easy enough with a docker-compose up db -d).
Using quadlets, if I do systemctl --user start db, I can see in the logs, that right after it automatically starts sum-pod, which then directly starts web, defeating the whole idea.
Analyzing the created systemd service I can see the --pod-id-file argument for the container which seems to auto-start the pod.
Is there a way to prevent this and only start db without also starting web, but still being able to start both together?

As a sidenote, requires and after are not enough because the real thing has more containers and are not dependent on another. And it seems hacky to create an extra systemd file linking all of those together, and not quadlet-like.

[Luap99]

The pod unit must always be started as it runs the infra container when any container unit is started. And the pod by default will start all the containers in it but that can be turned off StartWithPod=false

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

[witchent]

Damn, that actually makes sense, but I guess pods are not what I want then.
Assume I remove the pod (which would be fine, I tested it with a custom network and it worked), is there a good way to manage multiple containers with a single command?
I can of course create an extra systemd user service that only starts/stops all corresponding containers, but then I have to manually edit that file if I ever rename a container/create a new one. This was really handy with using pods.

[baude]

init containers might be helpful

[Luap99]

init containers are not support by quadlet, also see #25596

[witchent]

From a quick glance I do not see how this would solve my problem anyhow, but I will dig a bit deeper. If anyone got another idea I'd be very happy to see it, otherwise I'll probably hack around it with a custom systemd user service for each used-to-be-pod

[witchent]

So I scripted my way around it, automatically creating group systemd services that just start all other services. Good enough I guess. Thank you very much for your help and your work on this awesome project :)