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:

Use one of the sub-directories under images to create a fedora-toolbox image for a Fedora version that matches your host. eg., let's say we have a Fedora 28 host.

[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$ cd images/fedora/f28
[user@hostname f28]$ buildah bud --tag fedora-toolbox:28 images/fedora/f28
STEP 1: FROM docker://registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:28
Getting image source signatures
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[user@hostname fedora-toolbox]$

Note that the image should be tagged as fedora-toolbox with a suffix matching the host Fedora version. In this example, it should be fedora-toolbox:28.

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 ~]$