Why no OpenRC(Alpine) support or dedicated little service?

[senpro-ingwersenk]

I just fell into an unexpected, really "dumb" pitfall that properly confused me.

When a container defines HEALTHCHECKs, Podman would schedule them to be looked after. Well - it does do that, but only with SystemD and not with OpenRC, which is what Alpine uses.

My collegue contacted me, asking me why his containers were stuck in "starting" and it took me way too long to figure this one out. For the time being, I have just done a little cronjob - but that feels like such a hack, seriously.

On Alpine, the podman-openrc package starts a small Podman service (podman --start --respawn-delay 2 --respawn-max 5 --respawn-period 1800 --user root /usr/bin/podman -- system service --time 0) - and I am curios, why this one couldn't also periodically run healthchecks too?

Like, I know that Podman is largely "systemd-oriented" - for the lack of a better term - but this still feels like a missing feature.

So, aside from a crontab "hack", is there actually a better solution to this? And, why exactly is this not implemented? Don't get me wrong, I am genuenly curious (and pretty baffled simultaneously, kinda).

Thanks, and kind regards! :)

[Luap99]

So, aside from a crontab "hack", is there actually a better solution to this? And, why exactly is this not implemented? Don't get me wrong, I am genuenly curious (and pretty baffled simultaneously, kinda).

Because most people use systemd so the amount of people caring would be quite low if you also consider most don't use healthchecks. I it was just recently that someone contributed something to address it, #27033
Though I guess with conmon rewrite work going on that could take a while to make meaningful progress.

and I am curios, why this one couldn't also periodically run healthchecks too?

see #27033 (review)

[senpro-ingwersenk]

I see - so it's literally just "too few people use it". That's fair enough, can't support everyone, everywhere and everything - although with how popular Alpine is as a base image, I would've expected it to be a little more popular for hosts also.

Can you point me at the SystemD template being used to create the timer, perhaps? I just want to cross-reference that with my crontab entry. Because if it isn't supported by default, I might as well just make sure its as proper as it can be.

Thanks for the infos! =)