molecule-podman not working on github CI with systemd

[fauust]

Hi!
I am moving my role CI testing from Travis to GitHub actions and I took the opportunity to also move from docker to podman (that works much better with systemd and that I use locally). I am stuck in this project for some times now and I can't find a good way of debugging it.

I am now able to start a rootless podman container with systemd on the ubuntu-latest runner thanks to the help from @kassannk here.

The following works in GitHub actions:

podman run --name sys-test --rm -d fauust/docker-systemd:debian-10
podman exec -it sys-test bash -c "systemctl status systemd-journald"

And podman inspect sys-test shows that the container is up and running with /lib/systemd/systemd command.

But when I create the container in a molecule context molecule create and I inspect it, it is not running.

You can see the full logs of both inspect commands here https://github.com/fauust/ansible-role-mariadb/runs/2797968500?check_suite_focus=true.

My guess so far is that there is something on the ubuntu-latest runner that prevents the container to start correctly because I am not able to reproduce this on a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 VM (with the same podman version that GH use).

Any help would be really appreciated!

[gotmax23]

Take a look at https://github.com/gotmax23/ansible-role-update/blob/5a22e1ff20aa34834a1b2b7c5a7232b445f79404/.github/workflows/molecule.yml#L133. The reason you faced this issue on Github Actions and not your local machine is because Github Actions does not start a Systemd user instance by itself, which is required for rootless Podman*. On most Linux distros, a Systemd user service starts automatically when you log in, but this is not the case on Github Actions runners.

*: I believe there is some way to remove dependence on Systemd.

[fauust]

Nice, that worked, thanks @gotmax23!
fauust/ansible-role-mariadb@be3e1a0