Launch podman on system boot in Mac

[robbiemu]

I want to repurpose an M1 Mac as a sort of light-weight, local dev cloud environment.

So right now I have an Azure SDK demo project that is a cloud function that just returns what it is given. And of course I have a virtual machine to run it in, defined by this handy script:

podman-init.up.sh

#!/bin/sh

PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
PODMAN_INIT_PATH=/Users/Shared/source/podman-init
IGNITION_FILE=$PODMAN_INIT_PATH/ignition.json

podman machine init --cpus 4 \
            --disk-size 128 \
            --memory 8196 \
            --rootful \
            --volume /Users/Shared/volumes/podman:/mnt/shared \
            podman-vm

There actually isn't an ignition file.

After I run that I can see podman-vm listed:

remove@srvmini2 httptrigger-demo % podman system connection list            
Name            URI                                                         Identity                                                      Default     ReadWrite
podman-vm       ssh://core@127.0.0.1:49385/run/user/502/podman/podman.sock  /Users/remove/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/machine  false       true
podman-vm-root  ssh://root@127.0.0.1:49385/run/podman/podman.sock           /Users/remove/.local/share/containers/podman/machine/machine  true        true

and can manually run podman machine start podman-vm:

remove@srvmini2 httptrigger-demo % podman machine start podman-vm
Starting machine "podman-vm"
API forwarding listening on: /var/run/docker.sock
Docker API clients default to this address. You do not need to set DOCKER_HOST.

Machine "podman-vm" started successfully
remove@srvmini2 httptrigger-demo % podman machine list           
NAME        VM TYPE     CREATED            LAST UP            CPUS        MEMORY      DISK SIZE
podman-vm   applehv     About an hour ago  Currently running  4           8.004GiB    128GiB

So, with this in mind, I set up a plist file to execute that command on startup:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.podman.vmnetd.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>com.podman.vmnetd</string>

    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>

    <key>inetdCompatibility</key>
	<dict>
		<key>Wait</key>
		<false/>
	</dict>

    <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
    <dict>
        <key>PATH</key>
        <string>/opt/homebrew/bin:/opt/homebrew/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin</string>
    </dict>

    <key>PosixSpawnType</key>
    <string>Adaptive</string>

    <key>UserName</key>
    <string>root</string>

    <key>GroupName</key>
    <string>wheel</string>

    <key>Program</key>
    <string>/opt/homebrew/bin/podman</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>machine</string>
		<string>start</string>
		<string>podman-vm</string>
	</array>

    <key>StandardOutPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/podman/com.podman.vmnetd.log</string>

    <key>StandardErrorPath</key>
    <string>/var/log/podman/com.podman.vmnetd.err</string>
</dict>
</plist>

And, I thought it would work with the same user name "remove" that worked on the command line, but apparently it needs to be root. Even still, the machine doesn't start, even manually on the command line well after boot like. sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.podman.vmnetd.plist, and I see this in /var/log/podman/com.podman.vmnetd.err:

Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM
Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: Get "http://d/v5.0.2/libpod/_ping": dial unix /run/podman/podman.sock: connect: no such file or directory

Does anyone know what I need to do to get this to work with LaunchDaemons? I swear, I've seen comments from people that indicate to me that this should work!

[msbsh]

Hey @robbiemu you got this up and running?
If so I would be interested.