# Toolbox — Unprivileged development environment

[Toolbox](https://github.com/debarshiray/toolbox) is a tool that offers a

familiar RPM based environment for developing and debugging software that runs

fully unprivileged using [Podman](https://podman.io/).

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](https://ostree.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) based Fedora systems like

[Silverblue](https://silverblue.fedoraproject.org/).  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](https://www.opencontainers.org/)

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.

## Usage

### Create your toolbox container:

```

[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.

### Enter the toolbox:

```

[user@hostname ~]$ toolbox enter

🔹[user@toolbox ~]$

```