Managing and monitoring Podman Quadlet in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console

Setting up and using Podman Quadlet with Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console

April 13, 2026
Jelle van der Waa
Related topics:
Application modernizationContainersDeveloper tools
Related products:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) web console is an interface designed for managing and monitoring your local system, as well as Linux servers in your network environment. The web console supports multiple plug-ins (for example, one to manage virtual machines and another to manage Podman containers). This post guides you through setting up and using a Podman Quadlet with the web console.

What is Podman Quadlet?

Podman Quadlet is a tool for running Podman containers under systemd in a declarative way. For more information, read the Podman Quadlet introductory blog post.

Quadlet support in the web console

The Podman plug-in for the web console supports creating containers and all supported lifecycle operations on a container. A quadlet container is ephemeral, configured with a declarative file, but once it's created it does not start automatically. The Podman plug-in has been adjusted to detect these inactive containers and use systemd for lifecycle operations.

After incremental improvements in cockpit-podman versions 100, 107, 108 and 116, quadlet containers are now fully integrated in the web console.

Creating a Podman Quadlet test application

To demonstrate how you can deploy a Podman Quadlet container fully in the web console, we will set up the built-in Python web server in a container. The Podman plug-in doesn't come with an editor to create a quadlet configuration file, but the web console has a plug-in with a built-in file editor.

Open the web console, and ensure that you have administrative access. If the web console shows Limited Access, click on it to gain administrative access.

Click on the File browser under Tools and browse to /etc/containers/systemd/. To change the path using text input, click on the pencil icon next to Favorites (as in Figure 1).

The Files plug-in allows you to locate and edit files in the web console.
Figure 1: The Files plug-in allows you to locate and edit files in the web console.

Right-click and create a new file named webserver.pod with as contents (as demonstrated in Figure 2):

[Pod]
PodName=webserver-pod
PublishPort=80:8000

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Creating a file in the File plug-in of the web console.
Figure 2: Creating a file in the File plug-in of the web console.

Now create a new file webserver-data.volume:

[Unit]
Description=Webserver Data Volume

[Volume]
Label=app=webserver_data

Lastly the actual container "webserver.container" with as contents:

[Unit]
Description=Python webserver
After=local-fs.target

[Container]
ContainerName=webserver
Pod=webserver.pod
Image=docker.io/python:3.14
Exec=/usr/bin/python3 -m http.server
Volume=webserver-data.volume:/data
WorkingDir=/data
HealthCmd=["/usr/bin/curl", "--fail", "--silent", "--show-error", "http://localhost:8000"]

HealthStartPeriod=30s
HealthInterval=30s
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Once the files are there, we need to reload the systemd units. The web console doesn't have a button for this, but the terminal page provides you with everything you need. Right-click on the directory pane, or click the "kebab" (3 vertical dots) menu to open the terminal page in the current directory, as in Figure 3:

Access a terminal from the files plug-in.
Figure 3: Access a terminal from the files plug-in.

To generate systemd units for the Podman Quadlet container and pod, use the systemctl daemon-reload command:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

The quadlets are now available and visible in the Cockpit Podman plug-in for easy management. Open the cockpit-podman page to verify that it now displays your new pod, as in Figure 4. Select Start from the kebab menu to start the pod.

A new pod, accessible within Cockpit.
Figure 4: A new pod, accessible within Cockpit.

Click the disclosure triangle on the left, and then click the Health check tab to reveal that the health check has failed consistently (Figure 5):

Health checks have failed for the duration of the example pod's life.
Figure 5: Health checks have failed for the duration of the example pod's life.

The health check fails because the web server doesn't serve anything (or rather, it serves an empty podman volume). The web console currently doesn't support listing volumes, but the volume is listed in the Integration tab (Figure 7):

The Integration tab displays the volume.
Figure 6: The Integration tab displays the volume.

If you copy and paste the volume location to the host, you can open it in the file browser, and then create a file named index.html with some basic HTML as its content:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Red Hat Enterprise Linux</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Welcome</h1>
</body>
</html>

In the terminal page of the web console, use curl to view the rendered web page:

$ curl http://localhost:80
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Red Hat Enterprise Linux</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Welcome</h1>
</body>
</html>

On the Podman page, the container now shows Healthy, because the health check passes (Figure 9):

The example web server in an officially healthy state.
Figure 7: The example web server in an officially healthy state.

Web console integration

Podman Quadlet containers are fully integrated in the Services, Metrics, and Logs pages of the web console. The Details tab has a direct link (at the bottom of the page, as in Figure 7) to the Service page, where you can see the logs and the systemd unit status.

The metrics page shows the quadlet container, if it's using a lot of CPU, memory or disk I/O.

Limitations

The Podman page does not support listing all volumes on the system and operating on them. It also doesn't have a modal to make quadlets.

We want your feedback

Now it's time for you to try it for yourself! Report bugs regarding Quadlet and Podman integration to the Podman issue tracker. Send ideas or feedback to the discussions page. For the file management functionality, report bugs to the files issue tracker, and ideas or feedback to the discussions page.