For the last two years, I’ve been treating compose files as individual runners for individual programs.
Then I brainstormed the concept of having one singular docker-compose file that writes out every single running container on my system… (that can use compose), each install starts at the same root directory and volumes branch out from there.
Then I find out, this is how most people use compose. One compose file, with volumes and directories branching out from wherever ./ is called.
THEN I FIND OUT… that most people that discover this move their installations to podman because compose works on different versions per app and calling those versions breaks the concept of having one singular docker-compose.yml file and podman doesn’t need a version for compose files.
Is there some meta for the best way to handle these apps collectively?
Just forget about podman-compose and use simple Quadlet container files with Systemd. That way it is not all in the same file, but Systemd handles all the inter-relations between the containers just fine.
Alternatively Podman also supports kubernetes configuration files, which is probably closer to what you have in mind, but I never tried that myself as the above is much simpler and better integrated with existing Systemd service files.
Requires podman 4.4 though
No, from that version on, it is integrated in Podman, but it was available for earlier versions as a 3rd party extension as well.
But if you are not yet on Podman 4.4 or later you should really upgrade soon, that version is quite old already.
Debian stable has podman 4.3 and 4.4 is not in stable-backports