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.
[…] Fedora Toolbox — Hacking on Fedora Silverblue […]
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[…] One thing though that was clear to us was that as we where making all these changes to improve the ease of use and reliability of Linux as a desktop operating system we couldn’t make life worse for developers. Developers are the lifeblood of Fedora and Linux and thus we have had Debarshi Ray working on a project we call Fedora Toolbox. Fedora toolbox creates a seamless experience for developers when using an immutable OS like Silverblue, yet want to be able to install the wonderful world of software libraries and tools that makes Linux so powerful for developers. Fedora Toolbox is now ready for early adopters to start testing, so I recommend jumping over to Debarshi’s blog to read up on Fedora Toolbox. […]
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24 October, 2018 at 17:34
You state in the project repo that this is “Hacking on OSTree-based Fedoras”, however, this does not seem to be limited in use to only OSTree-based platforms, right?
gbraad
30 November, 2018 at 05:02
It is definitely driven by the needs of OSTree-based Fedoras. I expect that in its current form it can be used on non-OSTree-based OSes too, but that’s just coincidence. It might suddenly change in future.
Debarshi Ray
30 November, 2018 at 23:44
[…] A few months ago, we had a glimpse at Fedora Toolbox setting up a seamlessly integrated RPM based environment, complete with dnf, on Fedora Silverblue. But isn’t dnf considered a persona non grata on Silverblue? How is this any different from using the existing Fedora Workstation then? What’s going on here? […]
Fedora Toolbox — Under the hood | Debarshi's den
21 January, 2019 at 21:20
[…] diesem Zusammenhang wird auch das Projekt Fedora Toolbox weiter vorangetrieben. Es soll Entwickler befähigen, auch auf schreibgeschützten Systemen wie […]
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