Podman containers and systemd

Nearly two years ago, I wrote about how to manage Podman containers using systemd. What I didn’t know back then was that it had already been deprecated, as the project was moving towards Quadlet. It turns out the experience is now considerably more user-friendly, although with a few gotchas. The equivalent of the example in that blog post is:

$ cat ~/.config/containers/systemd/valkey.container

[Container]
Image=docker.io/valkey/valkey:8
PublishPort=6379:6379

[Quadlet]
DefaultDependencies=false

[Service]
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

It could be made even shorter and more like a regular systemd unit, if it wasn’t for the DefaultDependencies=false in the Quadlet section. This is used to ensure that the container startup isn’t delayed for 90 seconds (!). It can be then brought up like any systemd user mode service:

$ systemctl --user start valkey