I’m currently trying to migrate my stack on my VPS from docker to podman. Bonus points if I get it running rootless.
Somehow, podman compose just wouldn’t work with my existing docker compose file. I quickly found out that podman has many options, but quadlets are preferred. It took me a while to understand what they even are and their concept. I did get the idea and the concept from the docs, but everything else was demonstrating how to set up a very simple one (think a hello world container). Or I found some blog posts with ready made complex examples for some random stacks that were way over my head. But a simple tutorial on how to map the fields/parts of a docker compose to a .container
, .network
or .volume
file for my stack consisting of several containers in a few networks with a reverse proxy in front of it? Nope.
I’m the end I found podlet and used that to convert a docker-compose. While the result wasn’t completely working (e.g. a problem with some environment vars that got passed and switched in a few “layers” that podlet understandably messed up), it was enough to understand all of it with the docs and complete the quadlet. Now I just need to experiment with the rootless part.
Currently, my first and foremost pet peeve is, that different distros use different approaches and utilities, but many blog posts or guides don’t tell you what distro they’re for. If you google the problem and find the fourth guide on how to solve it and realize halfway through, that it’s again e.g. for Debian based systems, while you’re running on SUSE or RedHat or Arch or… can be very frustrating.
Maybe I didn’t search right, but since I found podlet first, while looking for a tutorial, I was lazy and gave it a try. It’s result was enough to get me there. Maybe, had I completely read the podlet docs and checked all optional arguments, o could have gotten a perfect result. But that way, I learned better about quadlets.