Fedora Toolbox — Hacking on Fedora Silverblue

Fedora Silverblue is a modern and graphical operating system targeted at laptops, tablets and desktop computers. It is the next-generation Fedora Workstation that promises painless upgrades, clear separation between the OS and applications, and secure and cross-platform applications. The basic operating system is an immutable OSTree image, and all the applications are Flatpaks.

It’s great!

However, if you are a hacker and decide to set up a development environment, you immediately run into the immutable OS image and the absence of dnf. You can’t install your favourite tools, editors and SDKs the way you’d normally do on Fedora Workstation. You can either unlock your immutable OS image to install RPMs through rpm-ostree and give up the benefit of painless upgrades; or create a Docker container to get an RPM-based toolbox but be prepared to mess around with root permissions and having to figure out why your SSH agent or display server isn’t working.

Enter Fedora Toolbox.

It makes it trivial to get a mutable development environment on Silverblue:

[rishi@bollard ~]$ fedora-toolbox create
[rishi@bollard ~]$ fedora-toolbox enter
🔹[rishi@toolbox ~]$


It uses OCI containers underneath, but takes away the cognitive overhead of thinking about containers by providing a seamless integration with the host environment. It uses rootless podman and buildah, so there’s no root in the picture either.

If you are going to try it out, make sure that you have the runc-1.0.0-56.dev.git78ef28e package in your Silverblue image. There’s also an ongoing review to get fedora-toolbox added to Fedora. If you don’t feel comfortable mucking around with rpm-ostree on the command-line, then fear not. Very soon all the necessary pieces will be part of the OS image, making it that much easier to start hacking on your Silverblue.