Skip to content

Containerized Harvest on Linux using Podman Quadlets

This documentation describes how to run Harvest in a container using Podman Quadlets. Quadlets are a way to manage Podman containers with systemd. This is useful for running Harvest as a service on Linux.

In this guide, we'll create a Podman Quadlet for each Harvest poller and a systemd service that starts the pollers when the system boots.

Summary of Steps

  1. Install Harvest, set up your harvest.yml, and generate a harvest-compose.yml using the Harvest CLI per the Harvest documentation. details
  2. Use podlet to generate Quadlet files from the harvest-compose.yml file from step 1. details
  3. Make a few edits to the generated Quadlet files and move them to /etc/containers/systemd/. details
  4. Tell systemd to reload the services by running systemctl daemon-reload.
  5. Start the systemd managed pollers (e.g., sudo systemctl start poller-sar).
  6. Reboot the machine and verify that all pollers restart.

Generate Harvest Compose Files

Install Harvest and generate harvest-compose.yml.

# cat example harvest-compose.yml

services:
  u2:
    image: ghcr.io/netapp/harvest:latest
    container_name: poller-u2
    ports:
      - "12990:12990"
    command: '--poller u2 --promPort 12990 --config /opt/harvest.yml'
    volumes:
      - ./cert:/opt/harvest/cert
      - ./harvest.yml:/opt/harvest.yml
      - ./conf:/opt/harvest/conf
    networks:
      - backend

  sar:
    image: ghcr.io/netapp/harvest:latest
    container_name: poller-sar
    ports:
      - "12991:12991"
    command: '--poller sar --promPort 12991 --config /opt/harvest.yml'
    volumes:
      - ./cert:/opt/harvest/cert
      - ./harvest.yml:/opt/harvest.yml
      - ./conf:/opt/harvest/conf
    networks:
      - backend

Podlet

Install podlet or compare the example harvest-compose.yml above with the generated quadlets below and make similar edits for your harvest-compose.yml.

podlet compose harvest-compose.yml

# u2.container
[Container]
ContainerName=poller-u2
Exec=--poller u2 --promPort 12990 --config /opt/harvest.yml
Image=ghcr.io/netapp/harvest:latest
Network=backend
PublishPort=12990:12990
Volume=./cert:/opt/harvest/cert
Volume=./harvest.yml:/opt/harvest.yml
Volume=./conf:/opt/harvest/conf

---

# sar.container
[Container]
ContainerName=poller-sar
Exec=--poller sar --promPort 12991 --config /opt/harvest.yml
Image=ghcr.io/netapp/harvest:latest
Network=backend
PublishPort=12991:12991
Volume=./cert:/opt/harvest/cert
Volume=./harvest.yml:/opt/harvest.yml
Volume=./conf:/opt/harvest/conf

Edit Quadlet Files

Podlet created two YAML documents as shown above, one for each poller. We are going to make the following adjustments to the podlet output and copy/paste the final output into /etc/containers/systemd/poller-u2.container and /etc/containers/systemd/poller-sar.container.

The edits are:

  1. Remove the Network=backend line that was included for Prometheus.
  2. Change all Volume paths to fully qualified paths. (e.g., change ./cert to /opt/harvest/cert if you installed Harvest at /opt/harvest)
  3. Because we want to restart the pollers when the machine reboots add the following section:
[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

[Service]
Restart=always

Here is the final output for the sar poller service with all the edits applied: 

# sar.container
[Container]
ContainerName=poller-sar
Exec=--poller sar --promPort 12991 --config /opt/harvest.yml
Image=ghcr.io/netapp/harvest:latest
PublishPort=12991:12991
Volume=/opt/harvest/cert:/opt/harvest/cert
Volume=/opt/harvest/harvest.yml:/opt/harvest.yml
Volume=/opt/harvest/conf:/opt/harvest/conf

[Install]
# Start by default on boot
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target

[Service]
Restart=always

Move Quadlet Files

Move each service file to /etc/containers/systemd/ e.g. mv poller-sar.container /etc/containers/systemd/poller-sar.container

References