Tips on Toolbx

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

I personally devoted effort on Docker Images which makes it easy to develop in Docker containers.

Create a user with same uid/gid as the user on the host on the fly so that permissions are handled seamlessly.
Lots of useful tools are pre-installed and configured.

Toolbx / DistroBox share similarities with my effort on Docker images. Of course, Toolbx / DistroBox are superior in many ways.

Toolbx / DistroBox are NOT based on Docker but rather podman (which is more secure).
Toolbx / DistroBox have seamless integraito with the host. Tools installed in Toolbx / DistroBox feel native.

I’ve migrated those Docker images to leverage Podman + Toolbx. See more discussions in My Podman Container Images .

General Tips¶

Since the home directory is shared between the host and the container, binaries under the home directory (e.g., ~/.local/bin/) will be available in the container as well. They might just work inside the container. For example, if you have Claude CLI installed on the host machine (under ~/.local/bin), you will be able to use it inside the container as well without installing it again inside the container.
Information of the running container is stored in /run/.containerenv inside the container.

Table 1:Toolbox Command Comparison

Command	What it does	Best Used For
`toolbox enter`	Drops you into an interactive shell inside the container.	Active development, installing packages, or exploring the environment.
`toolbox run`	Runs a single command inside a container, creating/starting it automatically if needed.	One-off scripts, CI/CD automation, or running an app without “entering”.
`toolbox exec`	Runs a single command inside an already running container (lower-level native podman wrapper).	Background automation or scripts where you know the container is already active.

toolbox create --distro ubuntu --release 24.04

toolbox create --image <registry/image:tag> <container_name>

toolbox @ GitHub contains a images directory which was the source code of podman/toolbx images quay.io/fedora/*-toolbox. However, it is deprecated and I’m not sure where the latest source code is for images quay.io/fedora/*-toolbox.
Universal Blue Atomic Linux Distributions has its own customized podman/toolbx images ghcr.io/ublue-os/*-toolbox which are based on quay.io/fedora/*-toolbox. The source code is at ublue-os/toolboxes @ GitHub .