I would like to share with you my pet project inspired by ArgoCD but meant for podman: orches. With ArgoCD, I very much liked that I could just commit a file into a repository, and my cluster would get a new service. However, I didn’t like managing a Kubernetes cluster. I fell in love with podman unit files (quadlets), and wished that there was a git-ops tool for them. I wasn’t happy with those that I found, so I decided to create one myself. Today, I feel fairly comfortable sharing it with the world.
If this sounded interesting for you, I encourage you to take a look at GitHub - orches-team/example . It contains several popular services (jellyfin, forgejo, homarr, and more), and by just running 3 commands, you can start using orches, and deploy them to your machine.
I thought this could be interesting for this community, since universal blue promotes the git approach for operating systems, and orches does something quite similar, but orchestrating containers. One of my orches nodes actually runs on ucore, the other one runs on a fedora bootc image.
This is excellent! Thank you for building and sharing this project! One thing that has come up multiple times with uCore is a desire to provide example podman quadlet services, as well as questions about how to manage them. I haven’t wanted to dive too deep into that topic as part of uCore itself because managing that really is a separate project space.
This really does feel like a perfect fit for someone wanting to manage services on uCore or another podman centric server, and I think we could look at including it as a recommended solution with what we are building here.
You may have seen my post about uCore: Retirement… In case there is any question, there WILL be a Universal Blue server project to take it’s place in our org.
For the record, I’m happy to push orches as a package in Fedora. It hasn’t been a big priority because distributing as a container image felt like a more natural way for people that want to run containers. However, running orches directly on the host makes the experience somewhat smoother (no more prefixing your orches commands with podman exec systemd-orches, and juggling orches volume mounts).