Does anybody know if there are any utilities which facilitate doing a podman exec
very similarly to the Fedora Silverblue toolbox enter
subcommand?
I have a cheap bash script I’ve named nest
which is roughly equivalent to toolbox enter
. Silverblue toolbox is impressive, I learned a lot looking at the code. But I find toolbox too controlling and monolithic. So I’m currently using a bunch of cheap highly custom bash scripts.
The ‘toolbox enter’ sub command functionality seems like something that can be decoupled into a simple stand-alone utility. Many separate methods can create mutable ‘pet’ containers. “Entering/execing” and “creating” these containers need not be with a single utility.
This utility would also be very similar to the ‘podman containter runlabel’ subcommand [1], except this utility would do podman exec rather than podman run. This utility assumes a container has already been created (podman create) with certain metadata label tags very similar to toolbox. Except more like ‘podman container runlabel’, details, like the actual podman parameters, are controlled in the container’s label, not fixed by the utility.
I hope such a utility can be like my nest
script in that I can run commands like nest webdev
to “enter” (like toolbox) a container with a name that is versioned (say container name “nest-webdeb-5”) and defaults to telling podman exec
to run with the command /bin/bash --login
. Or I could run nest chrome
and it runs a container with the name say “nest-chrome-132” and by default tells podman exec
to runs the command /usr/bin/google-chrome --no-sandbox
.
Additional nice functionality is:
- automatically
podman start
the container if not running - automatically
podman stop
the container when the last remainingpodman exec
process ends - subcommand
nest ls
which lists containers thatnest
can exec (enter)
[1] https://github.com/containers/libpod/blob/master/docs/source/markdown/podman-container-runlabel.1.md