Seeking Guidance on podman kube play Best Practices

[chriskyfung]

Hi team,

I'm experimenting with migrating from podman-compose to podman kube play and have run into a few challenges. I'm opening this issue to seek guidance and document the process for others.

So far, I have:

• Manually converted a podman-compose.yml to a podman-kube.yml file.

The main challenges have been:

1. Container Commands: Understanding the difference between command and args in the Kubernetes YAML, which caused some initial container start failures (e.g., cloudflared).
2. Environment Variables: The biggest hurdle is that podman kube play does not automatically load .env files like podman-compose does. The current workaround is to export the variables from the .env file before running the podman kube play command.

You can reference the Podman GitHub issues 24345 and 26170.

I'd appreciate any advice or best practices from the team on this workflow. Is there a better way to handle .env files with podman kube play? Are there any other "gotchas" I should be aware of when moving from podman-compose?

Thanks!