Podman not supporting --scale flag

[unvaare]

I have been facing this issue where i am trying to scale down or up the services using --scale option but podman-compose is ignoring the altogether and spinning up containers as given in compose file.

Can someone please help?

[metal3d]

A Pod shares the same IP for all containers.
Scaling the same service will try to open several times the same ports on the Pod. So it's not possible.
Compose seems to not propose a way to create one pod per service. That would be the solution. But at this time, it's impossible.

And it's a pitty.

[heitorPB]

Is there a workaround for this issue?

[me-coder]

@metal3d,
@unvaare is curious regarding podman-compose ignoring --scale.
podman-compose as default doesn't create pods unless directed to do so with --in-pod, but creates containers just like docker compose does (godman-compose more of a drop-in replacement for docker compose).
So --scale seems like a necessary feature support, which is missing from podman-compose.

Typically after podman-compose up -d we don't see any pods:

# podman pod ps
POD ID      NAME        STATUS      CREATED     INFRA ID    # OF CONTAINERS

Unless the command is accompanied by podman-compose --in-pod hosting up -d.

# podman pod ps
POD ID        NAME         STATUS      CREATED         INFRA ID    # OF CONTAINERS
d391e937fe90  pod_hosting  Running     46 seconds ago              1

In later case, what you have explained might apply, but for the former case there would be different containers with individually separate IPs that would be created and shouldn't be an issue.

[metal3d]

It seems that there is now a x-podman directive that may set in-pod to false.

[epag]

I also just ran into this same issue, did anyone find out a workaround?

[me-coder]

@unvaare, @epag,
I've submitted #1159 to address this, which is a partial working fix.
If you are still active and interested in this, could you help me test and review this change-set?

[epag]

Happy to help out in what ways I can later this week when I get some free time, thanks for addressing this! Fingers crossed my IT department is able to upgrade the version to include the change 🤞