Toolbox Setup for Fedora Silverblue

toolbox (toolbx) is a utility shipped with Fedora Silverblue to easily create and use containers.
It’s usage primarily revolves around using CLI utilities not shipped by default on Fedora Silverblue.
It is stylized and branded as toolbx, although toolbox is the command name.

There are official toolbx images for Fedora Linux, RHEL, Ubuntu and Arch Linux.
Community-maintained toolbx images for other distros can be found at https://github.com/toolbx-images/images

Alpine Linux Container

Alpine Linux is a container-focused distribution that is extremely lightweight in terms of size.
As such, I recommend using Alpine Linux for your toolbx containers.

• Create the toolbx container by using the Alpine Linux toolbx image from toolbx-images repo.

  toolbox create --image quay.io/toolbx-images/alpine-toolbox:latest toolbox-alpine-cli
  

• Enter the toolbx container you just created.

  toolbox enter toolbox-alpine-cli
  

• Some common commands for managing the Alpine Linux container are given below.

  # Install programs
  sudo apk add <program>
  # Remove programs
  sudo apk del <program>
  ### Notice
  NOTE: Put your own CLI programs in /usr/local/bin
  

Fedora Linux Container

Fedora Linux is the default distro for the containers created by the toolbox tool.

• Create a Fedora Linux toolbx container.

  toolbox create -d fedora toolbox-fedora-cli
  

• Enter the toolbx container you just created.

  toolbox enter toolbox-fedora-cli
  

You can apply some optional tweaks to your Fedora Linux toolbx containers to make the default package manager dnf faster.

• Open /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and add/change the following values:

  # see `man dnf.conf` for defaults and possible options
  
  [main]
  # Download 20 packages simultaneously
  max_parallel_downloads = 20
  
  # Mirror must maintain download speed of atleast 256*1024 bytes (256KiB/s) for the duration of `timeout` value in seconds
  minrate = 262144
  
  # Mirror must maintain `minrate` amount of download speed in bytes for `timeout` value in seconds
  timeout = 5