Request for feedback: Etui development container tool

Hello, I made a thing for creating containers for development environments, similar to Toolbox, but in contrast to that, separating it from the host system as much as is practical, rather than sharing the entire home directory.

I’m already using it, but I’d like to turn it into something useful for some other people to. I’m not going to write too much more on it here, it’s described in the README at Björn Lindström / Etui · GitLab

If anyone has been looking for a way to deal with development environments in Silverblue and has some feedback on my ideas there, I’d be happy to hear them.

3 Likes

This looks interesting! There is definitely space for more specialized tools than Toolbox. You can also take a look at GitHub - cgwalters/coretoolbox: "pet container" tool using podman from @walters.

I should add that and also yrps / tlbx · GitLab to a “related projects” section, for people that are looking for a slightly more powerful or just different take on Toolbox.

However, I think there’s also space for a tool filling the niche of providing a more “opinionated” workflow for managing development projects within containers. At least that’s what I needed. :slight_smile:

Basically, my path has been to look at facilities for various IDEs to run on the desktop but connect to development environments within containers, but been disappointed. What I’ve found is that those plugins are either not stable at all, or are only for a very narrow use case, like only a particular language or something like that. For other cases, it’s so far much more practical to run the entire IDE in a container, so this is my take on that.

1 Like

Adding a link to my toolbox clone written in Rust: Reto Kaiser / toolbox-njam · GitLab

It has the following features:

  • Config file to define toolboxes
  • Configure which paths to mount into the toolbox
  • Works with most standard container images of Linux distributions out of the box
3 Likes

Hello @njam,
Welcome to the discussion area! And thank you for bringing gifts.