Use Podman to Create Persistent systemd Containers and Pods on RHEL

We’re going to stand up a WordPress instance in a pod.

Perform the following tasks as cloud_user:

• Check for existing rootless containers and pods.
• Start by creating our pod. Remember, we want to publish port "80" in the pod to "8080" on the host. We want to name the pod "wp-pod".
• Check again for pods and containers. You should see your Infra container.
• Start the mariadb container.
  • Name the container "wp-db".
  • Add the container to the wp-pod pod.
  • Set --restart=always.
  • Use the "mariadb" short name for the container image.
  • Set the following variables
    • MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD="dbpass"
    • MYSQL_DATABASE="wp"
    • MYSQL_USER="wordpress"
    • MYSQL_PASSWORD="wppass"
• Check for containers again.
• Next, we'll start the WordPress container
  • Name the container "wp-web".
  • Add the container to the wp-pod pod.
  • Set --restart=always.
  • Use the "wordpress" short name for the container image
  • Set the following variables
    • WORDPRESS_DB_NAME="wp"
    • WORDPRESS_DB_USER="wordpress"
    • WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD="wppass"
    • WORDPRESS_DB_HOST="127.0.0.1"
• Check for containers and pods again.
• Check connectivity with a curl command on localhost:8080. You won't get anything back. Check the exit code immediately. It should be 0. If you'd like to try connecting with a web browser on the lab server's public IP, on port 8080, you can.Let's generate systemd unit files for our wp-pod pod!

Perform the following:

• Create the ~/.config/systemd/user directory.
• Change directory to the new directory.
• Generate our systemd unit files from our running pod.
• Take a look at our unit files.
• Stop and remove all pods.
• Check again for containers and pods.

Let's generate systemd unit files for our wp-pod pod!

Perform the following:

• Create the ~/.config/systemd/user directory.
• Change directory to the new directory.
• Generate our systemd unit files from our running pod.
• Take a look at our unit files.
• Stop and remove all pods.
• Check again for containers and pods.

We're going to enable and start our wp-pod pod using systemd.

Perform the following:

• Reload systemd as a non-root user (cloud_user) to pick up the new unit.
• Enable and start the container service as a non-root user.
• Check the status of our new systemd WordPress pod.
• Check for containers and pods again.
• Check connectivity with a curl command on localhost:8080. You won't get anything back. Check the exit code immediately. It should be 0. If you'd like to try connecting with a web browser on the lab server's public IP, on port 8080, you can.

We're going to configure our container to start when the system boots.

Perform the following:

• Check to see if linger is enabled for cloud_user
• Enable linger for cloud_user.
• Check to see if linger is enabled for cloud_user again

Let's test our persistent setup for our wp-pod pod!

Perform the following:

• Reboot to test our pod for persistence.
• Check for containers and pods again.
• Check connectivity with a curl command on localhost:8080. You won't get anything back. Check the exit code immediately. It should be 0. If you'd like to try connecting with a web browser on the lab server's public IP, on port 8080, you can.

Congratulations, Cloud Guru! You just created a persistent systemd pod!