mailman-podman-setup

Mailman 3 setup using Podman Quadlets. Containers are supposed to run in rootless mode.

requirements

Podman version 4 or later
pwgen to generate random secrets
an unprivileged user account to run the containers. A separate account (i.e. mailman is not required, but recommended.)

Switch to the user account you want to use to run Mailman.
In the user account's home directory, create the directory where the Systemd generator looks for quadlets. bash $ mkdir -p ~mailman/.config/containers/systemd
Then copy the files from the mailman/ subdirectory in this repository into the quadlet directory: bash $ cp mailman/* ~mailman/.config/containers/systemd/
Now we have to generate some secrets which the various components use to talk to each other: bash $ pwgen -1 32 | | podman secret create HYPERKITTY_API_KEY - $ pwgen -1 32 | podman secret create MAILMAN_REST_PASSWORD - $ pwgen -1 32 | podman secret create MAILMAN_WEB_SECRET_KEY -
Next adapt the environment variable definitions in mailman-core.container and mailman-web.container to your needs. You may want to customize at least the variable SERVE_FROM_DOMAIN, which is set to lists.example.com by default.
Finally run $ systemctl --user daemon-reload to trigger the systemd unit generator and start the services: $ systemctl --user start mailman-core mailman-web
By default Systemd launches user services only when the user logs in. To create a user session when the system boots, enable the automatic user session creation on boot with the following command as root: # systemctl enable-linger mailman