Toolbox your Debian

Last week I needed a Debian system to test things, I had heard others were using toolbox with Debian images without much trouble so decided to give it a go instead of creating a VM.

Toolbox only requires a handful utilities to work with any given docker image. After a quick search I stumbled upon Philippe’s post which in turn linked into this PR about an Ubuntu based toolbox image. Looks like the last major issues where worked out recently in toolbox and there isn’t anything extra needed apart the image.

Until the upstream PR is merged, I’ve adapted the image for Debian Sid and inlined the deps in one Dockerfile so its easier to fetch it and use it. The Dockerfile is hosted in a gist here.

Here is how to use it:

curl -o debian.Dockerfile 'https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/1653/raw/master/debian.Dockerfile'
podman build -t debian-sid-toolbox -f debian.Dockerfile .
toolbox create -c sid --image debian-sid-toolbox
toolbox enter sid

Enjoy!