Exciting additions to the upcomming version of 'Containers' gnome-shell extension

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1

Gnome-shell-extension-containers has been for long time convenient tool to manage podman containers. All of the features up to this point were containers only. In the upcoming version I’m adding also management to pods, images, volumes, and networks. With addition the extension is more thorough, as it exposes more entities that are in play when you run a container. For example, running a pod can have two containers, a network, and a volume, and now you can get a view to all of them, and manage some of their lifecycle (remove, stop, restart and more features to come)

One big internal change was to also move to use the unix-socket api, instead of invoking the command line and parsing the json. The podman socket API is version and stable, which makes programing against it a better choice, not to mention that I can just use the openapi spec that is generated for every version. The only challenge is that the podman.socket for a user session is not enabled by default (same for root I think). When the extension detects it, it offers to enable it on behalf of the user. I wanted to get feedback of the community about that, is that user experience compelling?

This is how it looks if the socket is not enabled. Pressing the button enables the socket activation)

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This is the new window with the new entities section for containers, pods, images, volumes, and networks:

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2

Nice work, thanks.

I installed it from the link and it is v38, is the newer version not available yet?

3

Thank you for giving this a try.
I did not release it yet, because I want to gather more feedback about the socket activation thing.
But here is a pre-release in github, with a tar.gz you can download and install using gnome-extensions install -f file.tar.gz

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4

I downloaded the tar.gz file to my Download folder on my Workstation. I also tried to install it direct from github. In both ways it searches for the metadata.json in .cache . There is a metadata.json in /src.

~/Downloads/gnome-shell-extension-containers-1.3.0-alpha.1/src$ gnome-extensions install -f /home/ilikelinux/Downloads/gnome-shell-extension-containers-1.3.0-alpha.1.tar.gz

/usr/bin/gnome-extensions install -f /home/ilikelinux/Downloads/gnome-shell-extension-containers-1.3.0-alpha.1.tar.gz
Error opening file /home/ilikelinux/.cache/gnome-shell-extension-containers-1.3.0-alpha.1/metadata.json: No such file or directory


gnome-extensions install -f https://github.com/rgolangh/gnome-shell-extension-containers/archive/refs/tags/v1.3.0-alpha.1.tar.gz
Error opening file /home/ilikelinux/.cache/v1.3.0-alpha.1/metadata.json: No such file or directory

I hope the above info helps to debug.

5

Sorry, I mixed the tar.gz with the .zip file. This should work:

curl -LO https://github.com/rgolangh/gnome-shell-extension-containers/releases/download/v1.3.0-alpha.1/containers@royg.shell-extension_1.3.0-alpha.1.zip

gnome-extensions install -f containers@royg.shell-extension_1.3.0-alpha.1.zip

gnome-extensions enable containers@royg

I think you need to re-login to the gnome session for it to take affect

7

Yes, thanks a lot. After tweaking a view times it worked. I guess first removing the old one, then installing the zip as explained above and after re-login check if it is there:

gnome-extensions list

If the podman Icon not appears, enabling the extension:

gnome-extensions enable containers@royg

should show it.

I will check the extension and give feedback.
Thx.