Toolbox is a tool that offers a familiar package based environment for developing and debugging software that runs fully unprivileged using Podman.
The toolbox container is a fully mutable container; when you see
yum install ansible
for example, that's something you can do inside your
toolbox container, without affecting the base operating system.
This is particularly useful on OSTree based operating systems like 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.
However, this tool doesn't require using an OSTree based system — it works equally well if you're running e.g. existing Fedora Workstation or Server, and that's a useful way to incrementally adopt containerization.
The toolbox environment is based on an OCI
image. On Fedora this is the fedora-toolbox
image. This image is used to
create a toolbox container that seamlessly integrates with the rest of the
operating system.
This is a Thoth toolbox! It contains a few tools published by Project Thoth ready to use on your local source code repositories or in conjunction with your OpenShift cluster.
[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox create thoth-toolbox
Created container: thoth-toolbox
Enter with: toolbox enter --container thoth-toolbox
[user@hostname ~]$
This will create a container called thoth-toolbox-<version-id>
.
[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox enter --container thoth-toolbox
⬢[user@toolbox ~]$
thoth-s2i is a tool that can assist you to port an existing application to use Thoth or expose information about OpenShift build configs used within a cluster. See https://github.com/thoth-station/s2i/blob/master/README.rst for more information.