Podman quadlets have been a blessing. They basically let you manage containers as if they were simple services. You just plop a container unit file in /etc/containers/systemd/
, daemon-reload and presto, you’ve got a service that other containers or services can depend on.
I’ve been in love with the concept of ansible since I discovered it almost a decade ago, but I still hate how verbose it is, and how cumbersome the yaml based DSL is. You can have a role that basically does the job of 3 lines of bash and it’ll need 3 yaml files in 4 directories.
About 3 years ago I wrote a big ansible playbook that would fully configure my home server, desktop and laptop from a minimal arch install. Then I used said playbook for my laptop and server.
I just got a new laptop and went to look at the playbook but realised it probably needs to be updated in a few places. I got feelings of dread thinking about reading all that yaml and updating it.
So instead I’m just gonna rewrite everything in simple python with a few helper functions. The few roles I rewrote are already so much cleaner and shorter. Should be way faster and more user friendly and maintainable.
I’ll keep ansible for actual deployments.
Podman not because of security but because of quadlets (systemd integration). Makes setting up and managing container services a breeze.