Fedora Toolbox

So I’m a little slow on this one, I believe Toolbox (formerly Fedora Toolbox) was released with Fedora 29 but it wasn’t until the release of Fedora 31 where I saw it mentioned. Toolbox allows you to create a container, or "toolbox" with access to your underlying host’s home folder. Inside this container you can install applications or specific development tools. This layering means that it won’t interfere with the rest of your desktop environment. For me, it has been a great way to test out new software without worrying about cluttering up my underlying operating system installation.

Using Toolbox is incredibly easy.

# first, install toolbox
$ sudo dnf install toolbox

# then, create a container
$ toolbox create

# to see a list of your toolboxes:
$ toolbox list
IMAGE ID      IMAGE NAME                                        CREATED
a198bc8c3cda  registry.fedoraproject.org/f31/fedora-toolbox:31  4 days ago

CONTAINER ID  CONTAINER NAME     CREATED       STATUS                    IMAGE
NAME
bb224aab88c5  fedora-toolbox-31  25 hours ago  Exited (143) 3 hours ago
registry.fedoraproject.org/f31/fedora-toolbox:31


# to enter a toolbox container:
$ toolbox enter [--container <name>]

# and to remove a toolbox:
$ toolbox rm <container name>

To make all of this magic happen it is using a combination of buildah, podman and OCI container images. Documentation at this point still seems pretty light but using it so far has been simple.