Podman Rootless Container Start on Boot

I’ve been a Docker user for years. I’ve never been an expert, I’ve only used it enough to get by in deploying Containers on my home lab for self-hosting services. Recently, I decided it was time to use Podman instead of Docker just so I could learn the differences. The major differences, as I understand it, is that Podman is more secure due to the ability of deploying a rootless container. So, I setup a new virtual machine running AlmaLinux 9, installed all the Podman packages and proceeded with, first, setting up Homarr dashboard using a Docker compose file. I deployed it as usual; this time using the podman-compose command instead of docker-compose using a standard non-root user. From there, I decided to migrate a couple of other containers (Freshrss and flatnote) from a different machine where they had been running as a Docker container to the new virtual machine running Podman and they all started up nicely. What I had found, so far, is that most things translate easily from Docker to Podman. Fair enough, easy enough.

But then I discovered, after a reboot of my virtual machine, that my Homarr dashboard wasn’t up. I logged in with my user account, ran the podman ps -a command and noticed that all three containers were not running. Long story short, in my research I found that Podman containers do not start up at boot due to there not being a daemon. The only way to fix this was to create a systemd unit file under the standard user’s profile. At first, I had found articles and blog post that you have to use the command podman generate on that specific container and it would create a systemd file for you, like this:

podman generate systemd --new --name homarr

However, when I ran the command, this warning popped up:

DEPRECATED command:
It is recommended to use Quadlets for running containers and pods under systemd.

Of course, this required further research on Quadlets. To keep this blog post short, after numerous articles and blog post, time and again, I discovered that most were creating a systemd file for each container. To me, that seemed ineffecient. Finally, I discovered a forum post (I believe it was the Bazzite forum) in which someone created a systemd file that started all containers at boot. During my own trial and error of creating the file named podman-restart.service, this is what I came up with, based on that user’s file, that seems to be working just fine once I placed it in my users home directory in /home/user/.config/systemd/user/:

[Unit]
Description=Podman Start All Containers With Restart Policy Set To Always
StartLimitIntervalSec=0
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=true
ExecStart=/usr/bin/podman start --all
ExecStop=/usr/bin/podman stop --all

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Ran the following command:

systemctl --user daemon-reload

and enabled the service with this command:

systemctl --user enable podman-restart.service

For the expert Podman users out there, I am sure there is a better way to do this but this seems to be working for me so I will stick with this plan going forward, if I decide to continue using Podman. If there is a better way, I welcome your input.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send me an email noted in my About page.