Auto update toolbox containers

Ask Fedora
1

This article below describes a similar approach as distrobox:

However, I have tmux as my default shell. My ~/.bashrc includes the following to make sure tmux is only ran with an interactive shell. However, toolbox --container fedora-toolbox run sudo dnf upgrade --quiet --refresh --assumeyes is also regarded as an interactive shell. Which doesn’t allow me to run that dnf upgrade command. It goes to an empty tmux shell.

if [[ -n "$DISPLAY" ]]; then # Only continue if in a GUI environment
  if [[ -z "$SSH_CLIENT" ]] || [[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && [[ -f /run/.toolboxenv ]]; then # Only continue if not in an SSH session
    if command -v tmux &> /dev/null && [[ -z "$TMUX" ]]; then # Only continue if tmux is installed and not already started
      exec tmux -2
    fi
  fi
fi

Which makes me wonder. How do you update your toolbox containers automatically? A different update approach might work as well.

2

If you’re embedding that command in a systemd unit, how do you know that it’s going into an empty tmux shell?

Also, are you certain “fedora-toolbox” is your container name? The default naming convention that’s used is “fedora-toolbox-##”. That’s what’s created when toolbox create is executed, and “##” being the Fedora release number that was used when that command was executed.

3

Because I can do it interactively, and then I just get a tmux shell in a new session where nothing happens.

And the logs say:

sep 15 00:00:09 ws1 systemd[2664]: Starting refresh-toolbox@fedora-toolbox.service - Refresh dnf cache (fedora-toolbox)...
sep 15 00:00:09 ws1 podman[233734]: 2024-09-15 00:00:09.353892125 +0200 CEST m=+0.052694297 container exec c1a70d0d88c6206f8473c363846d8489933bdefe1cd55354400b3124c7506b8d (image=localhost/user/fedora-toolbox:latest, name=fedora-toolbox, com.github.containers.toolbox=true, org.opencontainers.image.url=https://fedoraproject.org/, license=MIT, org.opencontainers.image.vendor=Fedora Project, version=40, vendor=Fedora Project, org.opencontainers.image.version=40, org.openconta>
sep 15 00:00:09 ws1 toolbox[233734]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
sep 15 00:00:09 ws1 toolbox[233734]: open terminal failed: not a terminal

It’s custom indeed, because I build my custom Fedora toolbox. Since Toolbox doesn’t have an easy way to template containers (like Distrobox), I created my own build with overlay packages. That’s why I also have a custom name for the container.

4

People don’t auto-update their Toolbox container I guess? Or maybe they do, but don’t have tmux setup in their Bash env of course.

5

May i ask how do you manage to template fedora toolbox ? i was looking alternatives to make a template for toolbox

6

Can you comment out the tmux stuff in your .bashrc and try? I’m curious if that’s really the problem.

7

Then it works. The method described in that blog post in the top post indeed works, but tmux intercepts it.

But I think nobody here auto-updates their container (in any other way). It sucks a bit, since distrobox makes this so easy and then it does work with tmux as default shell in bashrc.