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Operations

Day-to-day management of your containers: updates, backups, and maintenance.

Updating Containers

The default ghcr.io registry images are versioned using tags.

  • :latest - Builds daily from the upstream project's latest stable release.
  • :pkg - Builds from FreeBSD quarterly packages.
  • :pkg-latest - Builds from FreeBSD latest packages.

Podman CLI

  1. Pull new image: 
    podman pull ghcr.io/daemonless/radarr:latest
  2. Stop and remove old container: 
    podman stop radarr
podman rm radarr
  3. Start new container: Run your original podman run command again. Since /config is a volume, your data persists.

Podman Compose

  1. Pull new images: 
    podman-compose pull
  2. Recreate containers: 
    podman-compose up -d
    This automatically stops the old container and creates a new one only if the image has changed.

Automated Updates

Podman has a built-in auto-update system.

  1. Start your container with the --label "io.containers.autoupdate=registry" flag.
  2. Create a systemd user unit (or standard service) for the container.
  3. Run podman auto-update periodically (e.g., via cron or timer).

Note

This requires running the container as a systemd service, which is advanced usage. The manual pull && restart method is universally supported.

Backups

Backing up your data is critical. All daemonless containers store persistent data in the volume mounted to /config.

Backup Strategy

  1. Stop the container: Ensure database integrity (Radarr, Sonarr, etc. use SQLite). 
    podman stop radarr
  2. Archive the config directory: 
    tar -czvf radarr-backup-$(date +%F).tar.gz /path/to/config/radarr
  3. Restart the container: 
    podman start radarr

ZFS Snapshots

If your data is on ZFS, you can use snapshots for instant backups without long downtime.

# Snapshot
zfs snapshot zroot/data/config@backup-$(date +%F)

# Rollback (if needed)
# 1. Stop container
# 2. Rollback
zfs rollback zroot/data/config@backup-2024-01-01
# 3. Start container

Maintenance

Pruning Images

Over time, old image layers can accumulate.

# Remove unused images
podman image prune

# Remove all unused images (including untagged)
podman image prune -a

Checking Logs

If a container fails to start:

podman logs radarr

If the application crashes but the container is running: Check the internal service logs mapped to your host:

tail -f /path/to/config/radarr/logs/daemonless/radarr/current