Podman, Quadlets, and systemd

April 23, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

For a rootless setup, we can use quadlets and systemd to manage the container lifecycle.

Important

If this is the first container managed with quadlets for your user, ensure that linger is enabled so your containers are not killed after logging out.

sudo loginctl enable-linger <username>

Step One

Copy quadlet files to ~/.config/containers/systemd/tuwunel

tuwunel.container

tuwunel container quadlet 
{{#include ../../quadlet/tuwunel.container}}

tuwunel-db.volume

tuwunel database volume quadlet 
{{#include ../../quadlet/tuwunel-db.volume}}

tuwunel.env

tuwunel environment variable quadlet 
{{#include ../../quadlet/tuwunel.env}}

mkdir -p ~/.config/containers/systemd/tuwunel

Step Two

Modify tuwunel.env and tuwunel.toml to desired values. This can be saved in your user home directory if desired.

Step Three

  • Reload daemon to generate our systemd unit files:
systemctl --user daemon-reload

Step Four

  • Start tuwunel:
systemctl --user start tuwunel

Logging

To check the logs, run:

systemctl --user status tuwunel

or

podman logs tuwunel-homeserver

Troubleshooting systemd unit file generation

Look for errors in the output: /usr/lib/systemd/system-generators/podman-system-generator --user --dryrun