Toolbox is a tool that offers a familiar RPM based environment for developing and debugging software that runs fully unprivileged using Podman.
The toolbox container is a fully mutable container; when you see
yum install ansible for example, that's something you can do inside your
toolbox container, without affecting the base operating system.
This is particularly useful on OSTree based Fedora systems like Silverblue. The intention of these systems is to discourage installation of software on the host, and instead install software as (or in) containers.
However, this tool doesn't require using an OSTree based system — it works equally well if you're running e.g. existing Fedora Workstation or Server, and that's a useful way to incrementally adopt containerization.
The toolbox environment is based on an OCI
image. On Fedora this is the fedora-toolbox image. This image is then
customized for the current user to create a toolbox container that seamlessly
integrates with the rest of the operating system.
[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox create
[user@hostname ~]$
This will create a container, and an image, called
fedora-toolbox-<your-username>:<version-id> that's specifically customised
for your host user.
[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox enter
🔹[user@toolbox ~]$