toolbox - Man Page

Tool for interactive command line environments on Linux

Examples (TL;DR)

Run a toolbox subcommand: toolbox subcommand
Display help for a specific subcommand (such as create, enter, rm, rmi, etc.): toolbox help subcommand
Display help: toolbox --help
Display version: toolbox --version

Synopsis

toolbox [--assumeyes | -y] [--help | -h] [--log-level LEVEL] [--log-podman] [--verbose | -v] COMMAND [ARGS...]

Toolbx is a tool for Linux, which allows the use of interactive command line environments for software 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.

Supported operating system distributions

By default, Toolbx tries to use an image matching the host operating system distribution for creating containers. If the host is not supported, then it falls back to a Fedora image. Supported host operating systems are:

Arch Linux
Fedora
Red Hat Enterprise Linux >= 8.5
Ubuntu

However, it's possible to create containers for a different distribution through the use of the --distro and --release options that are accepted by the relevant commands, or their counterparts in the configuration file. The --distro flag specifies the name of the distribution, and --release specifies its version. Supported combinations are:

Distro	Release
arch	latest or rolling
fedora	<release> or f<release> eg., 36 or f36
rhel	<major>.<minor> eg., 8.5
ubuntu	<YY>.<MM> eg., 22.04

Usage

Create a Toolbx container

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox create
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:36 (294.1MB)? [y/N]: y
Created container: fedora-toolbox-36
Enter with: toolbox enter
[user@hostname ~]$

Enter the Toolbx container

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox enter
⬢[user@toolbox ~]$

Remove the Toolbx container

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox rm fedora-toolbox-36
[user@hostname ~]$

Global Options

The following options are understood:

--assumeyes, -y: Automatically answer yes for all questions.
--help, -h: Print a synopsis of this manual and exit.
--log-level=level: Log messages above specified level: debug, info, warn, error, fatal or panic (default: error)
--log-podman: Show log messages of invocations of Podman based on the logging level specified by option log-level.
--verbose, -v: Same as --log-level=debug. Use -vv to include --log-podman.