Podman application lifecycle on the device

For quadlet and container applications, the Red Hat Edge Manager agent manages the full lifecycle of the workload by using the local Podman runtime and systemd.

Install
The agent pulls the OCI artifact, extracts the configuration files to the host, and initializes the service through Podman. Finally, the agent reports the container status back to the service.
Upgrade
When you update the image reference or inline configuration (such as envVars) in the device specification, the agent pulls the new artifact if it changed. The agent then replaces the existing configuration files and restarts the service.
Uninstall
When you remove a Podman-based application from the device specification, the agent stops the associated containers and removes the configuration files from the device.

Start, stop, and restart
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In addition to install, upgrade, and uninstall, you can control the power state of Podman-based applications by using flightctl app start, flightctl app stop, and flightctl app restart (or the equivalent UI actions). These operations drive the desiredState and restartGeneration fields on the rendered application specification, enabling you to stop, start, and restart applications declaratively without removing them from the device specification.

This lifecycle control is available for all Podman-based application types (quadlet and container), as well as VM, Compose, and Helm applications.