Is there a Linux technology that looks like this?

Posted by MarsupialLeast145@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 25 comments

I am a developer who writes a lot of 101s. I am looking to expand to write a more complex piece of software and turn it into a tutorial.

While I am pretty confident I won't mess things up locally, AND I could also get a disposable VM... I want people who read my guide/tutorial to be able to access my lessons easily without too much concern.

Is there a Linux technology that is light-weight and I can set up within an hour that:

Gives me a process isolated shell.
Acts like a virtual environment that allows me to install binaries.
Allows me to access existing binaries, e.g. cli tools/compilers.
Provides isolated disk space.
Enables me to still use my local ports, e.g. for running simple web servers.
Ideally I can turn it "on" or "off" when I don't need it any more, e.g. a learner can quit and their progress remains in this isolated sandbox.

I think that's all my primary requirements I can pinpoint right now.

Any ideas appreciated! (thank you in advance fellow tutors/learners!)

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razorree@reddit

something like Distrobox? (there are few similar container based solutions)

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MarsupialLeast145@reddit (OP)

Just playing around with distrobox now and I think it may be the one for now. There are some good blogs about providing better isolation, and I think for my users I will ask them to create a new user on their Linux system which isn't bad hygiene anyway.

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syklemil@reddit

Sounds mostly like containers to me. Have you looked into tools like podman (or docker)?

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MarsupialLeast145@reddit (OP)

I know Docker but my early interactions with it made it seem like it wasn't designed to give me a shell and installing dependencies was a much more rigid affair where I really would like learners to be able to engage with both the shell and the file system.

Does Podman do that? or is Docker also able to provide that?

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grantrules@reddit

It's super easy to get into a shell.. just use a base image like debian then run docker run -it bash and there's your shell and you can install stuff with apt.

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Marbletm@reddit

This might be interesting to you:
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

You can define a dev container through a json file and vscode will create a development container based off of that. So once you've defined everything it's easy to share your setup.

It works off of Docker, so you do need a basic understanding of it to set things up as the course designer. But it should be really easy to get running as a learner.

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syklemil@reddit

Both of them can do that. If you want to run a short-lived ubuntu install, you can podman run --rm -it ubuntu (or s/podman/docker/).

For your usecase it seems like you'll want to set up some Containerfile and build an image that your learners will use, and likely also some compose file for stuff like running with certain ports and volume mounts.

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MarsupialLeast145@reddit (OP)

I'll follow the Podman thread a little more -- any sort of simplification over Docker would help.

Any does Podman have compose like capability?

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syklemil@reddit

Yeah, from the head of podman compose --help:

Run compose workloads via an external provider such as docker-compose or podman-compose

Description:
This command is a thin wrapper around an external compose provider such as docker-compose or podman-compose. This means that podman compose is executing another tool that implements the compose functionality but sets up the environment in a way to let the compose provider communicate transparently with the local Podman socket. The specified options as well the command and argument are passed directly to the compose provider.

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Fit-Original1314@reddit

Yep, containers are basically built for this

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Hybrii-D@reddit