Developers may occasionally come across the need to set up an Endless OS container environment. This will provide you with the base Endless OS runtime environment without any of the graphical user interface components, but unlike on a standard Endless OS installation, the root filesystem is read-write within the container, and you can install Debian packages from Endless & Debian repositories.
These containers are hosted on Docker Hub and can be set up within Endless OS installations or other Linux distributions.
The eos-toolbox container is our primary offering for a development environment based on Endless OS. It consists of the minimal container (as below) plus C compilers, build tools like meson and make, developer utilities like curl and git, and so on. It also has labels set up such that toolbox can work with these container images.
You can create a toolbox container based on this image as follows:
toolbox create -i docker.io/endlessm/eos-toolbox:master
You can now enter this container as follows:
toolbox enter eos-toolbox-master
This opens a new shell, running inside the container. Toolbox arranges for your home directory to be accessible within the container, and apps running within the container can create graphical windows, access system services, and so on.
Check out the toolbx documentation for more information.
The eos container is a bare-bones offering, which includes only packages from Debian or Endless OS which are marked as required priority. This includes tools like apt, which you can use to download additional packages.
Pass docker.io/endlessm/eos:master to Docker/Podman to use this. For example:
Set up a basic container with podman
podman container create --tty --interactive --name EndlessMinimal docker.io/endlessm/eos:master /usr/bin/bash
Start the container
podman start EndlessMinimal
Enter a bash shell within the container
podman exec --interactive --tty EndlessMinimal /usr/bin/bash