You might want to look into .nspawn files instead. Then you can also manage your nspawn-containers with the machinectl command. See man 5 systemd.nspawn And m

You might want to look into .nspawn files instead. Then you can also manage your nspawn-containers with the machinectl command. See man 5 systemd.nspawn And many command like systemctl and journalctl accept the -M parameter, which allows you to query systemd units inside your nspawn-containers from the host. edit: The article actually explains all of these things in more detail.