Podman container - complete newbie welcomes help please!

Installation
1

HI all - I am brand new trying to setup Home Assistant, hoping to have some options for an imminent solar & battery install etc.

I have re-used an old SBC I have (RockPro64 with NVMe disk) running arch linux, and installed Home Assistant, it seems fine, with podman. I can access Home Assistant fine via http://server:8123 and have created a user and account and selected my location.

Next I want to try integrate with my Nissan LEAF OpenCARWINGS - step 1 says I need HACS.

HACS says I need to start fiddling with my container, but despite being logged in and looking at my location I don’t seem to have a container!

Some of my stabbing about:

$ podman exec -it homeassistant bash
Error: no container with name or ID "homeassistant" found: no such container

$ podman ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE       COMMAND     CREATED     STATUS      PORTS       NAMES
[csn@RPro64 ~]$

But

$ systemctl status homeassistant
● homeassistant.service - Home Assistant
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/containers/systemd/homeassistant.container; generated
)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2026-09-18 21:36:59 BST; 1h 16min ago
 Invocation: 374813b4b8c5481faff92b1275f41fe7
   Main PID: 1367 (conmon)
      Tasks: 34 (limit: 2327)
     Memory: 527.2M (peak: 570.3M)
        CPU: 1min 21.816s
     CGroup: /system.slice/homeassistant.service
             ├─libpod-payload-bccf86ac07358686213cc99cc87b3551cef1c9827a870db5cf60691825b4a9fc
             │ ├─1369 /package/admin/s6/command/s6-svscan -d4 -- /run/service

etc
I seem to have missed a step with podman - any help welcomed. TIA

2

Maybe there is a Podman Forum out there ?

PS: For You to be able to install the HACS Integration, You need to Install the HACS-App(Container) … Well that’s the easiest way, Not sure howto, howto if you run HA-Container

But as you basically asking help for Podman, i suggested a Podman forum :wink:
NOTE: i believe you could try to install HAOS “baremetal” on your Device
( i.e using similar as this install procedure , Raspberry Pi - Home Assistant . )

3

Try running the command(s) as root.

4

Thank you - can’t imagine how I could have been so blind :saluting_face: