Docker compose has a depends on condition which you can use to choose the order in which services start up to prevent this issue. https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/05-services/#depends_on However, can I have an example of the podman commands you’re using to start both lldap and the database? If it’s two separate commands maybe just a wait, for a health check to pass on the database before running the second run command would be sufficient.