Podman-Containerfiles

Simple Podman Quadlet Containerfiles for home use.

The expectation is that these services are run behind a firewall/router and are not exposed to the internet. There are ways of getting access to them remotely with a vpn/tailscale/netbird/reverse proxy, but those are not in the scope of this repository.

I mainly want to document for myself and anyone who may find it useful getting started with podman containerfiles, and hopefully you have to spend less time than I did struggling to convert the ever common dockerfiles into something podman can turn into a systemd service.

Getting Started - Things to prepare so you and your services are happy:

Log in as the user you want running your containers and enable podman

systemctl --user enable --now podman.socket

Run this command for container auto-updating (also needs specifying in the containerfile)

systemctl --user enable podman-auto-update
add "AutoUpdate=registry" under [Container] in your .container file

Allow your user to run podman services without needing you to login

loginctl enable-linger $USER

Place your .container files under ~/.config/containers/systemd/

Run this command when you update or create a .container file

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user restart <name-of-service(s)>

To have your containers talk to each other create a podman .network or .pod

See examples in repo for podman pods

Set up podman secrets

nano secretfileforpodman "and then type a good password"
podman secret create mypodmansecret secretfileforpodman
rm secretfileforpodman
You can also pass the password directly to podman to create a secret:
echo "superstrongpassword" | podman secret create mypodmansecret -
Remember to remove the value of the password from your bash history in ~/.bash_history
I recommend storing the passwords (as they are deleted) in a password manager or someplace safe

Generating containerfiles with podlet

I have found a starting point for generating containerfiles from compose files with podlet: https://github.com/containers/podlet.
It is a good rough draft, though it won't capture the need for pods/networks.
If you have podman-desktop you can also generate containerfiles from a running container with the quadlet extension.

Useful Troubleshooting Commands

systemctl --user restart --no-block; journalctl --user -f
/usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator --user --dryrun

References:

https://blog.datalad.org/posts/forgejo-aneksajo-podman-deployment/
https://thinkaboutit.tech/posts/2025-07-13-implement-nextcloud-with-podman-quadlet/#create-pod
https://scardex.nl/portfolio/pieter/9
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/installation/docker/
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/multi-container-application-podman-quadlet
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/podman-kubernetes-secrets
https://old.reddit.com/r/podman/comments/16onu8p/podman_secrets_how_the_hell_does_it_work/
https://github.com/jbtrystram/immich-podman-systemd/tree/main