5f324d537e
This builds on top of commit 0465d78fd9034ce9. The toolboxImage type has been renamed to Image and moved into the podman package. There is nothing Toolbx specific about the type - it represents any image returned by 'podman images'. The images are only later filtered for Toolbx images. Secondly, having the Image type inside the podman package makes it possible to encapsulate the unmarshalling of the JSON within the package without exposing the raw JSON to outside consumers. This is desirable because the unmarshalling involves tracking changes in the JSON output by different Podman versions, and it's better to limit such details to the podman package. https://github.com/containers/toolbox/pull/1190 |
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completion | ||
data | ||
doc | ||
images | ||
playbooks | ||
profile.d | ||
src | ||
test/system | ||
.codespellexcludefile | ||
.gitignore | ||
.gitmodules | ||
.mailmap | ||
.zuul.yaml | ||
CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md | ||
CONTRIBUTING.md | ||
COPYING | ||
gen-docs-list | ||
GOALS.md | ||
meson.build | ||
meson_options.txt | ||
meson_post_install.py | ||
NEWS | ||
README.md | ||
SECURITY.md | ||
toolbox |
Toolbox is a tool for Linux, which allows the use of interactive command line environments for development and troubleshooting the host operating system, without having to install software on the host. It is built on top of Podman and other standard container technologies from OCI.
Toolbox environments have seamless access to the user's home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc..
This is particularly useful on OSTree based operating systems like Fedora CoreOS and Silverblue. The intention of these systems is to discourage installation of software on the host, and instead install software as (or in) containers — they mostly don't even have package managers like DNF or YUM. This makes it difficult to set up a development environment or troubleshoot the operating system in the usual way.
Toolbox solves this problem by providing a fully mutable container within
which one can install their favourite development and troubleshooting tools,
editors and SDKs. For example, it's possible to do yum install ansible
without affecting the base operating system.
However, this tool doesn't require using an OSTree based system. It works equally well on Fedora Workstation and Server, and that's a useful way to incrementally adopt containerization.
The toolbox environment is based on an OCI
image. On Fedora this is the fedora-toolbox
image. This image is used to
create a toolbox container that offers the interactive command line
environment.
Note that Toolbox makes no promise about security beyond what's already available in the usual command line environment on the host that everybody is familiar with.
Installation & Use
See our guides on installing & getting started with Toolbox and Linux distro support.