This is a new implementation of https://github.com/debarshiray/toolbox/

Be sure you have cargo installed.

Then: cargo install --git https://github.com/cgwalters/coretoolbox

In the future we may invest in packaging this for different distributions, or see about shipping it with e.g. podman by default.

One time setup

$ coretoolbox create
<answer questions>
$

Now, each time you want to enter the toolbox:

$ coretoolbox run

One suggestion is to add a "profile" or configuration to your terminal emulator that runs coretoolbox run by default, so that you can easily create new tabs/windows in the toolbox.

In order to disambiguate in this text we'll call this tool "ctb", and the other one "dtb".

The main reason to introduce a new tool is that dtb too strongly encourages true "pet" containers, where significant state is stored inside. We want to make it easy for people to build their own toolbox "base images" derived from the upstream image. For example, rather than doing yum install cargo inside a toolbox container, you use a Dockerfile that does:

FROM registry.fedoraproject.org/f30/fedora-toolbox:30
RUN yum -y install cargo

The toolbox command should ideally have at least a basic concept of a "build" that regenerates the base container, but at a minimum should support more easily specifying that base image.

A related problem with dtb is that it actually does create a derived image locally with e.g. the username added; this forces the image to be specific to one user or machine.

What "ctb" does instead is inject dynamic state (username, HOME path) into the container at runtime. This allows a lot more flexibility.

Today "dtb" has a hardcoded list of bind mounts for e.g. HOME and the DBus system bus socket. I ran into a case where I wanted e.g. the system libvirt socket.

In general, we aren't trying to confine toolbox - it's a privileged container. So "ctb" takes the approach of mounting in most things from the host into the /host directory, and then uses symlinks into /host. This again makes everything a lot more flexible as the set of things exposed can easily be changed while the container is running.

Finally, ctb is written in a real programming language; bash gets problematic once one goes beyond 10-20 lines of code.

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (./LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (./LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) at your option.