ansible-playbooks/roles/podman

Podman Role

Installs and configures Podman for container management with support for Docker Compose compatibility.

Features

• Installs Podman, podman-compose, and crun (OCI runtime)
• Configurable logging backend (journald or k8s-file)
• External network creation for service isolation
• Container registry search configuration
• Shared projects directory for compose files

Container Logging

journald (default):

• Logs sent to systemd journal
• View: journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=<name> -f

k8s-file:

• Logs stored as JSON files with automatic rotation
• Configured via podman_log_max_size and podman_log_max_files

Switch via podman_log_driver variable.

External Networks

Define networks in inventory for persistent, isolated container networks:

podman_external_networks:
  - name: immich
    subnet: 172.20.0.0/16
    gateway: 172.20.0.1

Networks persist across container restarts and compose rebuilds.

Hands-on Commands

# View container logs (journald)
journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=immich_server -f

# View container logs (k8s-file)
podman logs -f immich_server

# Check log driver
podman info --format '{{.Host.LogDriver}}'

# Inspect container log config
podman inspect <container> | jq '.[0].HostConfig.LogConfig'

# Test configuration
podman run --rm alpine echo "OK"

# List networks
podman network ls

References

• Podman Documentation
• Podman Logging
• containers.conf(5)