b1b1d459ed
It's one less invocation of an external command, which is good because spawning a new process is generally expensive. One positive side-effect of this is that on some Active Directory set-ups, the entry point no longer fails with: Error: failed to remove password for user login@company.com: failed to invoke passwd(1) ... because of: # passwd --delete login@company.com passwd: Libuser error at line: 210 - name contains invalid char `@'. This is purely an accident, and isn't meant to be an intential change to support Active Directory. Tools like useradd(8) and usermod(8) from Shadow aren't meant to work with Active Directory users, and, hence, it can still break in other ways. For that, one option is to expose $USER from the host operating system to the Toolbx container through a Varlink interface that can be used by nss-systemd inside the container. Based on an idea from Si. https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/585 |
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.github | ||
data | ||
doc | ||
images | ||
playbooks | ||
profile.d | ||
src | ||
test | ||
.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.