Tinkerbox is a tool to manage interactive podman containers for experiments and development.

It is like toolbox and distrobox, but does not share directories with host.

Work in progress, but useable.

Read code for instructions or call tinkerbox --help.

Tinkerbox mounts a persistent volume named <boxname>-home to the /home directory, so that the user can recreate the container with same name without losing it's data.

You can add any podman run flags to tinkerbox create after -- separator:

tinkerbox create -ialpine my_alpine_box -- --volume=$HOME/my_directory:$HOME/my_directory:rw

Use podman cp to move files from/to your containers.

Container can use host's X11 and Wayland servers, DBus, PulseAudio and PipeWire. See tinkerbox create --help for exact flags.

You can set your preferred shell by sudo usermod --shell /path/to/shell $USER.

If you would like to set environment variables the $HOME/.profile should do the trick.

Tinkerbox container runs $HOME/init for the root and your user. Put commands you would like to execute at start to ~/init and make this file executable.

host $ tinkerbox create -idebian webdav_server -- -p 127.0.0.1:8000:8000
host $ tinkerbox enter webdav_server
box $ sudo apt install chezdav
box $ echo chezdav --public --no-mdns -p 8000 -P $HOME \& > ~/init
box $ chmod +x ~/init
box $ logout
host $ podman stop webdav_server
host $ podman start webdav_server
host $ firefox http://localhost:8000

Edit /usr/local/sbin/tinkerbox-entrypoit if you want to change initialization further.

• Alpine
• Archlinux
• Debian (default)
• Fedora
• OpenSuse
• Ubuntu

Other images may work but not tested.