Arch Toolbox container image

[erazemk]

I'm creating an Arch base for toolbox.

Currently I get the error toolbox: failed to get the tag of image ./Dockerfile and I'm new to Podman/Buildah, so I don't know how to tag the file or if I should even use either of those to make the image.

• I've taken most of the packages from the Fedora images, but have replaced them with Arch equivalents.
• The VERSION variable doesn't really apply to Arch, so for now I've set it to "rolling", but any input on this would be very helpful.

Todo:

• Check if other packages are needed due to Arch changing base
• Test image

[martymichal]

Hi @erazemkokot, thanks for your interest in Toolbox and for this PR. I left some comments.

[martymichal]

I tried to build the image and when I got to this point, it errored out with no such command. That'll probably need some investigation??

[erazemk]

I've tested pacman -Scc and it works fine, did you mean no such command for /bin/sh or pacman?

[martymichal]

For CMD /bin/sh.

[erazemk]

Ok, I'll check it out (I'm pretty sure it was because bash is a part of the base metapackage now and I haven't added it yet when you were testing the image).

[erazemk]

@HarryMichal Thanks for the reply. Can you please tell me what I need to do to properly run the container, since I get the error in the first comment and can't even start it.

[martymichal]

Disclaimer: I'm no expert at building container images. I'm still discovering this.

First, you need to build the image before you can use it with Toolbox. My process looked like this:

$ cd <toolbox_dir>/images/arch
$ podman build .

The podman command can be replaced by buildah build-using-dockerfile. But this command doesn't work for me even with the already existing fedora Dockerfiles, so there is most likely more to it.

Maybe we should expand the README (or the GitHub Wiki or even the Fedora Wiki) with some instructions for image building. What do you think @debarshiray, @juhp??

[erazemk]

Maybe we should expand the README (or the GitHub Wiki or even the Fedora Wiki) with some instructions for image building.

I haven't read much documentation on podman yet, but I, and I'm sure a lot of other people, would appreciate a section in the readme dedicated to manually building images.

[kronenpj]

@HarryMichal

The podman command can be replaced by buildah build-using-dockerfile. But this command doesn't work for me even with the already existing fedora Dockerfiles, so there is most likely more to it.

If you're using an up-to-date buildah there's a bug report open which, when fixed, will address a message like:
error building at STEP "COPY README.md /": secure join: too many levels of symbolic links
A temporary workaround is to rm README.md and cp ../../../README.md .

Otherwise using buildah bud -t f32-toolbox . worked for me just now.

[kronenpj]

@erazemkokot
I'm not that familiar with Arch, but if the default "FROM" container has removed the documentation or man pages, you may want to re-install them. This way the person using the toolbox has the documentation available from the toolbox distribution.

In Fedora the approach was to take a selection of the packages and re-install them. Ubuntu container had a script /usr/local/sbin/unminimize that identified and re-installed packages where documentation was missing. Arch may have a similar approach.

[erazemk]

I'm not that familiar with Arch, but if the default "FROM" container has removed the documentation or man pages, you may want to re-install them. This way the person using the toolbox has the documentation available from the toolbox distribution.

I'll check, thanks for the warning.

[njam]

I've tested this, and can confirm that it works (toolbox create and toolbox enter).

For it to work I had to change two things in toolbox itself:

• #404 When bind-mounting a file, create the target path if it doesn't exist
• #405 Don't try to remove /media if it doesn't exist

[softwarefactory-project-zuul]

Build succeeded.

• shellcheck : SUCCESS in 2m 08s
• test-with-podman-stable-f30 : SUCCESS in 4m 04s
• test-with-podman-stable-f31 : SUCCESS in 3m 59s
• test-with-podman-rawhide : SUCCESS in 5m 11s

[erazemk]

I'm going to close this to give it a new - clean - shot, keeping in mind all the tips I got so far.