Programatically creating a Quadlet and activating it with systemctl daemon-reload / start?

[torntrousers]

Hello, how could i go about creating a Quadlet and activating it by calling systemctl --user daemon-reload and systemctl --user start programtically, and ideally having that code running in a container? Easy enough to mount a ~/.config/containers/systemd/ volume to the container to write the .container file to, but how could i call systemctl and get it to apply to the host not the container?

[eriksjolund]

Disclaimer: Untested idea.

Maybe combining

• systemd user path unit with DirectoryNotEmpty= (man page)
• systemd user service (Type=oneshot)

could work?

On the host set up a systemd user path unit with

DirectoryNotEmpty=/home/test/.config/containers/foobar.watch

Let the path unit trigger a systemd user service (Type=oneshot) that
moves the new file to /home/test/containers/systemd/ and then runs
systemctl --user daemon-reload

Podman command to run the quadlet creator container

podman run --rm --security-opt label=disable -v ~/.config/containers:/containers IMG

The container writes a quadlet file to

/containers/foobar.tmp/my.container

and then renames the file

mv /containers/foobar.tmp/my.container /containers/foobar.watch/my.container

(I guess it's good practice to use mv so that the file is added to the directory foobar.watch with an automatic operation)

Maybe --security-opt label=disable is not needed. If possible remove that option and add the volume option :Z

[torntrousers]

Thanks @eriksjolund might give that approach a try

[ygalblum]

I usually use Ansible for this. For example, the demo described in this blog post can be provisioned using this playbook.yml

[torntrousers]

Thanks @ygalblum . I had seen that blog post. Its a lot though to understand all properly. How would something simpler work, like the single container from here #21401 (reply in thread)?

[ygalblum]

The Ansible Playbook should be something like this:

- name: Setup Quadlet
  hosts: all
  vars: 
    quadlet_dir: "{{ ansible_user_dir }}/.config/containers/systemd/"
    container_file_path: "< Path to rpiblink.container >"
    service_name: rpiblink
  tasks:
  - name: Install packages
    become: true
    ansible.builtin.package:
      name:
      - podman

  - name: Create the Quadlet directory
    ansible.builtin.file:
      path: "{{ quadlet_dir }}"
      state: directory
      mode: '0755'
      recurse: true

  - name: Copy the Quadlet files
    ansible.builtin.copy:
      src: "{{ container_file_path }}"
      dest: "{{ quadlet_dir }}"
      owner: root
      group: root
      mode: '0644'

  - name: Run daemon reload to make Quadlet create the service files
    ansible.builtin.systemd:
      daemon_reload: true
      scope: user

  - name: "Starting the service"
    ansible.builtin.systemd_service:
      state: started
      scope: user
      name: "{{ service_name }}.service"
    async: 1800
    poll: 60

[abuxton]

i've found that rhel 9.4 podman is not looking in /etc/containers/systemd/ when you execute /usr/libexec/podman/quadlet -dryrun -user
it lists ;

• /etc/containers/systemd/users
• /root/.config/containers
• /root/.config/containers/systemd

as the file sit can not find quadlets in, and then does not produce a system file
when you copy your .kube file to any of those paths it works, but does not auto copy the file to /etc/systemd/system

has something changed ?

i muddled through from @ygalblum example repo. with ansible, and had to push the service file and .kube files

podman -v
podman version 5.2.2
cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.4 (Plow)

[ygalblum]

/etc/containers/systemd/ is a system directory not a user one. So, when you add -user to your command, or when it's executed at the user level by running systemctl --user daemon-reload Quadlet will not look at this directory.