Note to maintainers/reviewers:

I noticed the installer is mostly written specifically for docker in a procedural way. With the new support of podman, I'm happy to add a thin layer of abstraction to handle both podman and docker operations behind a maybe IContainer to make the code easier to follow. But I'd like to understand what people think on the style.

Also I noticed there's no unit test for the installer. Not sure if there're integration tests either. So if maintainers are good with interface-based mocks for UT, I can do a bit of rehaul to the installer in general for better test coverage. Let me know.

@wayneyaoo this is great thank you! To respond to some of your thoughts:

• Yes I think an abstraction layer for the container orchestration layer would be nice if we are going to support multiple going forward. I will never say no to better code! : )
• Unit and integration tests would be amazing as well! I will never say no to tests! : )

I can give it a test in a bit and see how it works out. If its looking good do you want to merge this and then take a look at these proposed changes or do you want to open a new PR?

@oschwartz10612 Thank you for being open-minded :) I think at the moment if we merge it first (provided that the functionality is ok) and get some feedback from people (if any), that'll help for future improvement. In the next PR I can do a rehaul to abstract stuff and add UT. How's that?

One more question: what is your thought on installation with CLI args:)? I mean pure interactive installation experience is fine but sometimes supplying values via CLI args with interactive asks as fallback seems more flexible. I know this probably isn't a big deal - people won't install pangolin all day lol. So just asking.

Great sounds like a plan. I will give it a test ASAP and then merge if it looks good.

CLI args would be good too with the fallback to interactive if not provided as you say. Maybe one day that opens up the ability to make a nice web configuration that spits out a command or something for people to run.

:) gentle ping

Hey @wayneyaoo yeah I tried it and it was not working on ubuntu either. I think the containers started but I could not access the UI at all. I had:

podman-compose version 1.5.0
podman version 4.9.3

from installing it using apt install podman

Is this what you were seeing? How are you installing podman >5 on Ubuntu/Debian? Do I need to build from source?

Edit: Never used podman before lol sorry

Interesting what is the error? I suspect distro-packed podman version is old. Maybe try at least podman version > 5.0? Podman compose version seems fine.

Also I noticed you tried to merge master by pushing a few commits - I didn't have a lot of PRs on Github before but is this normally how it's get done? Wouldn't it conflict the master later?

Sorry for the delay. At the containers seemed to go up fine and run but I was not able to access the web UI or anything externally. Using docker on the same install worked fine. I was using sudo so I dont think the port range thing was getting me?

I was wondering if it could be that the older versions dont support the service:gerbil network config or something and thats why the ports would not be exposed correctly?

I did found a bug somehow escaped the manual testing - but you're correct that running as root shouldn't have access issue. I fixed the bug and push a new commit.

But interestingly I couldn't get 1.7.3 working. The Pangolin container seems to be pending on start and stuck there forever. Could you confirm 1.7.x is a working release? I couldn't manage to test my change with the new release even though I downgraded to 1.6.2. (but it could be my podman installation too. Didn't realize how unfriendly it is to install a specific version of podman and podman compose... I'm new to podman too)

If 1.7.x confirms to work could you test the change again please? I remove those health check locally and the dashboard ends up with a 404 not found and Pangolin at 3001 not available - but at least traefik is up.

Realized maybe docker was messing with podman so made sure to stop docker when I was testing. Seems like it worked for me! I was able to run the installer with just the basic install of podman on ubuntu 24.04 and it seems to work fine!

Maybe the only thing I would consider is making podman a CLI arg instead of a question until we have the install built in? I think its just one more step most people dont want to think about but if you do want to use podman you can always use --podman.

Otherwise ready to merge I guess!

Are you suggesting in this PR we make the 1st question a CLI arg until we have podman auto installation like docker does? I'm good with that but given there's no CLI argument defined at the moment, making one there with a temporary purpose sounds ... inconsistent from future perspective. If we can get this in first, I'll prioritise a rewrite with CLI args. That should work in long term withouit a middle state. How's that?

Sounds good to me!