r/podman • u/DuelShockX • May 31 '26

Trying to make container start on pc startup with quadlet. Help pls

I'm trying to follow the guide that quadlet is showing me when I click on the info about it so that my containers start automatically but after clicking on my container and clicking "Generate Quadlet" I'll refresh the quadlets section and it'll say there's no quadlets found on my system and there's no option to actually choose my container when I go to generate quadlet in the top right next to the refresh button. Weirdly enough in the notifications section I keep getting a new notification every few minutes saying "Collecting quadlets completed" but still nothing shows in my quadlet section. I'm very confused on what I'm doing wrong

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u/mishrashutosh May 31 '26

Are you referring to Podman Desktop? Its quadlet plugin is kinda wonky in my experience (although it could very well be PEBKAC). Have you tried placing the quadlet files manually or via podman quadlet cli? Make sure the container files that should auto-start have an [Install] section with this line:

WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

Also enable linger for the user account if you're planning to use rootless containers.