Debarshi Ray
9f1a9c5971
This is meant to make the project more searchable on the Internet. More and more people have been pointing out that "toolbox" is terribly difficult to search for, and it's impossible to find any decent Internet real estate by that name. Some exceptions: * The code repository is still https://github.com/containers/toolbox. It will be renamed after giving a heads-up to other contributors. * The name of the binary is still 'toolbox'. The name is embedded into existing Toolbx containers as their entry point, which is bind mounted from the host operating system when the containers are started. Trivially renaming the binary will prevent these containers from starting. * The label used to identify Toolbx containers and images is still called com.github.containers.toolbox. There are many existing Toolbx containers, and many Toolbx images beyond the control of the Toolbx project that use this label to identity themselves. Simply renaming the label will prevent these containers and images from being recognized. * The names of the built-in Toolbx images still retain the word 'toolbox'. Images under the new name need to be published on the OCI registries and the toolbox(1) binary needs to be taught to handle both old and new names, wherever necessary, for backwards compatibility. https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/1399
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Toolbx 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.
Toolbx 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.
Toolbx 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 Toolbx environment is based on an OCI
image. On Fedora this is the fedora-toolbox image. This image is used to
create a Toolbx container that offers the interactive command line
environment.
Note that Toolbx 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 Toolbx and Linux distro support.