toolbox/README.md
Debarshi Ray 8b84b5e460 Drop the Buildah dependency and the user-specific customized image
This works by configuring the toolbox container after it has been
created, instead of before. The toolbox script itself is mentioned as
the entry point of the container, which does 'exec sleep +Inf' once the
initialization is done.

A new command 'init-container' was added to perform the initialization.
It is primarily meant to be used as the entry point for all toolbox
containers, and must be run inside the container that's to be
initialized. It is not expected to be directly invoked by humans, and
cannot be used on the host.

As a result, the default name for the toolbox containers is now
fedora-toolbox-<version-id>, not fedora-toolbox-<user>-<version-id>.
For backwards compatibility, 'toolbox enter' and 'toolbox run' will
continue to work with containers using the old naming scheme.

https://github.com/debarshiray/toolbox/pull/160
2019-05-16 15:47:33 +02:00

1.6 KiB

Toolbox logo landscape

Toolbox is a tool that offers a familiar RPM based environment for developing and debugging software that runs fully unprivileged using Podman.

The toolbox container is a fully mutable container; when you see yum install ansible for example, that's something you can do inside your toolbox container, without affecting the base operating system.

This is particularly useful on OSTree based Fedora systems like Silverblue. The intention of these systems is to discourage installation of software on the host, and instead install software as (or in) containers.

However, this tool doesn't require using an OSTree based system — it works equally well if you're running e.g. existing Fedora Workstation or 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 seamlessly integrates with the rest of the operating system.

Usage

Create your toolbox container:

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox create
Created container: fedora-toolbox-30
Enter with: toolbox enter
[user@hostname ~]$

This will create a container called fedora-toolbox-<version-id>.

Enter the toolbox:

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox enter
⬢[user@toolbox ~]$