pw-container - Man Page

The PipeWire container utility

Examples (TL;DR)

Create a new security context and print its socket address to stdout: pw-container
Run a specific program within a new security context: pw-container command argument1 argument2 ...
Run a program, connecting to a specific remote PipeWire instance: pw-container [-r|--remote] remote_instance_name command
Run a program in a new context with specific properties using a JSON object: pw-container [-P|--properties] '{"key": "value"}' command
Display help: pw-container [-h|--help]

Description

Run a program in a new security context [1].

pw-container will create a new temporary unix socket and uses the SecurityContext extension API to create a server on this socket with the given properties. Clients created from this server socket will have the security properties attached to them.

This can be used to simulate the behaviour of Flatpak or other containers.

Without any arguments, pw-container simply creates the new socket and prints the address on stdout. Other PipeWire programs can then be run with PIPEWIRE_REMOTE=<socket-address> to connect through this security context.

When PROGRAM is given, the PIPEWIRE_REMOTE env variable will be set and PROGRAM will be passed to system(). Argument to PROGRAM need to be properly quoted.

Options

-P | --properties=VALUE: Set extra context properties as a JSON object.
-r | --remote=NAME: The name the remote instance to connect to. If left unspecified, a connection is made to the default PipeWire instance.
-h | --help: Show help.
--version: Show version information.

Exit Status

If the security context was successfully created, pw-container does not exit until terminated with a signal. It exits with status 0 if terminated by SIGINT or SIGTERM in this case.

Otherwise, it exits with nonzero exit status.