Deploying Metabase as a Quadlet: A Rootless Podman Journey.
Recently I have been getting into Podman as a great (rootless) Docker alternative and its neat integration into Redhat based Linux distributions, rekindling my decade old love affair with Red Hat Linux. Being asked to deploy Metabase (Open-source Edition) as an internal service at my place of work, I decided to give the somewhat new Quadlets a try in deploying the service, instead of the older, deprecated way of asking Podman to generate systemd unit files.
I’ve been using Alma Linux 9.4, but this will work equally in Rocky Linux or Redhat Enterprise Linux of the same version.
We are going to create a dedicated Metabase user on the host, running their official Docker image with a Postgresql sidecar (application database) for the application and a secondary Postgresql sidecar (source database) for the source data for generating reports. The application database will be backed up nightly, the source database will be restored daily from a production backup.
First I created a dedicated user for Metabase, calling it metabase. This is not strictly required, but I like to deploy larger applications in their own little enclave. Furthermore, we will enable lingering for our newly created user, so that its systemd services will restart after a reboot.
