Portable is a sandbox framework targeted for Desktop usage and offers ease of use for distro packagers, which should work on most recent systems:

• enables unprivileged user namespaces

• uses systemd >=258

• has libseccomp >= 2.6

• a thread-safe libudev implementation (systemd-udevd is)

• has landlock ABI 8 and above (Linux kernel >= 7.0)

• Follows the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard)

  • Note that /lib /lib64 /bin /sbin should be symlinks to their respective locations under /usr

• Does not have mount points under /usr/bin, and use a supported fs of OverlayFS (NOT BcacheFS)

This is a rewrite of a rewrite of Portable!

• For the legacy Go version, see legacy-go branch.
• For the original Bash version, see legacy branch.

Portable has companion projects for packaging and sandboxing:

See Docs

• Minecraft
• Arch Linux
  • Arch Linux CN Repository
    • Only selected free/OSS apps
    • Updates faster
  • Portable for Arch
    • Configure your system to use portable-arch: https://github.com/Kraftland/portable-arch
    • Current support status (as of 09 Sep 2026): 37 packages in repo.

1. Running untrusted code is never safe, sandboxing does not change this.
2. On KDE Plasma window grouping may not work properly unless your desktop file name exactly matches certain arguments.
   • This is an KWin issue
3. Portable acts like Flatpak, to trick XDG Desktop Portal.
   • The correct way for this situation is to specify another sandboxing engine in XDP, which I have a PoC here
     • I barely understand C at all! Please help if you will.
   • The other possibly "correct way" is to wait until busd#34, and XDP's implementation.
     • Is it dead? idk.

Discuss Development at #portable-dev:matrix.org

See bawn for the successor of Portable Pools.

See Docs

1. Portable fails with something like invalid argument
   • BcacheFS is not supported, or you have mountpoints under /usr/bin and /usr/lib

Start portable with environment variable PORTABLE_CONF, which can be 1) the ID of the sandbox, 2) an absolute path (if exists), 3) a file name interpreted as $(pwd)/${PORTABLE_CONF}. It searches for each of them respectively.

• Debugging output can be enabled by building with debug assertions (debug builds).

To manually execute programs instead of following the exec.target config, start portable with argument --actions debug-shell. This will open a bash prompt and gives you full control of the sandbox environment.

When debug-shell is enabled on a debug build of Portable, D-Bus proxy will log to the standard output of primary instance.

Portable and any of its social environment follows the Kraftland Code of Conduct. Please be sure not to violate such rule set.

Portable follows a major.minor.patch version scheme. We thrives to provide a stable experiences with no breaking changes, however, if said change is necessary, will land in a major release.

The patch release is exclusive for bug fixes. Whereas minor releases contain new features. If a feature or a set of features needs time to test or is important enough, we conduct a major release.

Portable has and always will be only supporting the latest release. Generally users can upgrade without manual intervention, but between major releases it's advised to run systemctl --user stop portable.slice to stop the portable framework.