Template for an Ansible playbook that creates a pod systemd service and is easily extendable to make a good pod and container management system.

The main and only role in the playbook is pod which can be renamed to anything else. It creates a pod service and is has handlers for enabling and restarting the service. You can easily add tasks to the role in order to start containers in said pod.

A recommended way to create unit files is to generate them using podman cli.

Makes sure the units directory is present. This is done in case you wan't to deploy the pod in user scope (in rootless mode). It also sets SELinux context for the directory.

Sets the context for units directory in using semanage so default contenxt for all files created there would be proper.

Creates a pod service (systemd unit file) from a template. I'd recommend doing it this way so variables from ansible playbook could be used in the unit file.

In order to start containers inside a pod, you'll need to create service files for that container. Here is an example task for doing that including necessary notifications to make sure all configurations are reloaded on any change:

- name: create container service
  ansible.builtin.template:
    src: container.j2
    dest: "{{ units_path }}/container-{{ container_name }}.service"
    mode: 0644
  notify:
    - reload daemon
    - restart pod service

Reloads systemd daemon in order to load changes.

Makes sure the pod service is enabled so it starts on boot.

Restart the pod service. If unit files are generated using podman cli, all services for containers in the pod are dependant on pod service so when it restarts, so do container services. That way you can easily restart the whole pod with it's containers when some configuration is changed.

This template is licensed under the MIT license.