It is faster, leaner and translates well into Kubernetes. I also like podman Quadlets
I’ve just discovered Distrobox, and it has immediately replaced my .devcontainers. The fact that it integrares into your system so well is awesome, especially since I am doing Vulkan stuff at the moment.
Haven’t really looked into shareability, though. If it’s as easy to define and share a distrobox setup than it is a docker .devcontainer, then it’s perfect.
I used to use more distrobox but I got annoyed by software dumping stuff all over my home. Now I usually build containers and then use a directory mount.
I’ve been using podman forever; I’ve only used Docker a couple of times.
But tell me about Quadlets! I’ve never hear of them before.
I love quadlets, here’s an example:
$ cat .config/containers/systemd/kavita.container [Unit] Description=Kavita manga server After=mnt-files.mount [Container] ContainerName=kavita Image=docker.io/jvmilazz0/kavita:latest AutoUpdate=registry Network=kavita.network PublishPort=5000:5000 Environment=TZ=Etc/UTC Volume=/mnt/files/books/comics:/comics:ro Volume=/mnt/files/books/gnovels:/gnovels:ro Volume=/mnt/files/books/manga:/manga:ro Volume=${HOME}/kavita:/kavita/config:Z HealthCmd=curl -fsS http://localhost:5000/api/health || exit 1 [Service] Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=default.target
$ cat .config/containers/systemd/kavita.network [Network] NetworkName=kavita Options=isolate=true # library add uses Kavita site
If you’ve dealt with systemd service files this will look familiar, with the addition of the container section.
AutoUpdate=registry
gives you automatic updates to ‘latest’ (or whatever tag you’ve set) and there’s rollbacks too, so you just have to worry about the less-critical bugs in newer versions. Personally, I feel more secure with this setup, as this box is a VPS.Network=kavita.network
- I put all my containers in different networks (with minimal privs, so many don’t have outgoing internet access), and my reverse proxy is also in all of those networks so it can do its thing.Any chance you could go into more depth on your reverse proxy config? By the sounds of it you’re doing exactly what I would like to do with my services. Which reverse proxy are you using? What does your config look like? I’ve been trying to get both nginx and caddy working in the last 2 weeks and I’m REALLY struggling to get subnets working. My ideal setup would be using Tailscale and being able to follow the scheme
service.Device.tailXXXX.ts.net
. I’m struggling to find the reverse proxy config and DNS entries on my local network to get that working. I’ve seen comments saying people have done this, but none of them have shared their configs.
What if I told you that you could define containers with systemd units?
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/quadlet-podman
Quadlets are systemd files that define containers, networks and storage. It is the same idea as docker compose but with a daemonless model. Systemd starts your podman container workload just it does for any service. You can use systemctl commands and everything.