I’m testing out Podman Quadlet in my Armbian installed on my Orange Pi 3 LTS SBC. The Armbian distribution is based on Debian Bookworm. However, It only ships Podman v4.3.1 which doesn’t support the automatic podman-systemd generation yet.

In order to install the latest Podman (v5.4.2 as of the writing), I need to install it from the testing release repository.

NOTE:

If you’re looking for tutorial for Ubuntu, follow this instead: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/25582

Adding Debian Testing repository⌗

cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-testing
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.debian.org/debian
Suites: testing
Components: main
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/debian-archive-keyring.gpg
EOF

echo <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/podman
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 400
EOF

sudo apt update

Install podman from Testing repository⌗

sudo apt install -t testing podman

Configure Podman⌗

Configure Podman to use netavark as network backend, and iptables as firewall driver. This is personal configuration for rootful setup.

  1. Copy the containers.conf file

    cp /usr/share/containers/containers.conf /etc/containers/containers.conf

  2. Change the content of /etc/containers/containers.conf:

    • Uncomment network_backend = "" and change into network_backend = "netavark" under the [network] section.
    • Uncomment firewall_driver = "" and change into firewall_driver = "iptables" under the [network] section.

  3. As per documentation, it is recommended to restart the system

    sudo reboot

References⌗