toolbx

Installation

Toolbx is installed by default on Fedora Silverblue and Workstation. On other operating systems it’s a matter of installing the toolbox or podman-toolbox package.

Usage

Create your Toolbx container:

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox create
Created container: fedora-toolbox-41
Enter with: toolbox enter
[user@hostname ~]$

On a Fedora 41 host, this will create a container called fedora-toolbox-41. On an Arch Linux host, it will create one called arch-linux-latest, and so on.

Enter the Toolbx:

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

Remove a Toolbx container:

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox rm fedora-toolbox-41
[user@hostname ~]$

Dependencies and Building

Toolbx requires at least Podman 1.6.4, and optionally at least Skopeo 1.10.0, to work.

It uses the Meson build system and the following dependencies are required to build it:

• clang or gcc
• go >= 1.20
• go-md2man
• meson >= 0.58.0
• ninja
• shadow >= 4.9
• systemd

If the following dependencies are available when building, then various optional features are enabled:

• bash-completion
• fish

It can be built and installed as any other typical Meson-based project:

[user@hostname toolbox]$ meson setup -Dprofile_dir=/etc/profile.d builddir
[user@hostname toolbox]$ meson compile -C builddir
[user@hostname toolbox]$ sudo meson install -C builddir

Toolbx is written in Go. Consult the src/go.mod file for a full list of all the Go dependencies.

By default, Toolbx uses Go modules and all the required Go packages are automatically downloaded as part of the build. There’s no need to worry about the Go dependencies, unless the build environment doesn’t have network access or any such peculiarities.