Fedora Toolbox — Hacking on your OSTree-based Fedora

Fedora Toolbox is a tool that offers a familiar RPM based environment for developing and debugging software on locked down OSTree based Fedora systems like Silverblue. Such operating systems are shipped as immutable OSTree images, where it's difficult to setup a development environment with your favorite tools, editors and SDKs. A toolbox container solves that problem by providing a RPM based mutable container. You can tweak it to your heart's content and use DNF to install your favorite packages, all without worrying about breaking your operating system.

The toolbox environment is based on the fedora-toolbox image. This image is then customized for the current user to create a toolbox container that seamlessly integrates with the rest of the operating system.

Usage

Create the basic Fedora Toolbox image:

[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$ buildah bud --tag fedora-toolbox:28 .
STEP 1: FROM docker://registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:28
Getting image source signatures
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[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$

Modify the Dockerfile to match your taste and Fedora version. The image should be tagged as fedora-toolbox with a suffix matching the host Fedora version. eg., fedora-toolbox:29, etc..

Create your Fedora Toolbox container:

[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$ ./fedora-toolbox create
[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$

This will create a container, and an image, called fedora-toolbox-<your-username>:28 that's specifically customised for your host user.

Enter the Toolbox:

[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$ ./fedora-toolbox enter
🔹[user@toolbox ~]$