Quadlet: Prepend ExecStart podman option?

[jamespeterschinner]

I may be uninformed, but AFIAK when creating <thing>.container files for podman quadlet, there is no option to prepend something to the start of the ExecStart=/user/local/bin/podman run ... command?

The reason I ask and want this capability is to allow me to inject secrets via something like vault agent. Something like that feels to be a great fit (unless system-creds can somehow fill that requirement). Although using vault agent specifically would mean taking the generated ExecStart output and placing it into another config file (so not the exact use case I describe).

Prior to quadlet I was constructing my systemd .service files manually (and incorrectly it seems after seeing quadlets output) but I really need/want this ExecStart customization.

My current thinking is as follows.

• Generate unit files with QUADLET_UNIT_DIRS=$(pwd) ./quadlet -dryrun (using an undocumented env var for CI purposes) and then postprocessing before coping said unit file. (Basically looses all the benefit of getting automatic updates from podman)
• Custom generator which waits for expected files to be generated and modifies as required (explicitly breaks systemd generator contract)
• Maintain a version of my current systemd unit file generator with lessons from upstream quadlet or other derived works
• Seemingly the podman binary location can be overridden with PODMAN env var so could potentially stuff other commands into this (but no idea how to have said VAR set during system boot)

Anyway interested to hear thoughts on this. Thanks!

[ygalblum]

Yes, currently Quadlet runs only podman without the ability to prepend it with anything else and I'm not sure if this will change. Having said that I would like to better understand what you are running and see if we can find a solution that will allow you to still use Quadlet as is.
Can you provide an example of what you would prepend the command with? Also, have you considered defining another service and have the Quadlet unit depend on it (not sure if it doesn't break what you are trying to achieve, but still)?