Alpine Toolbox
==============

This is a little Alpine container I run to provide SSH logins with a bunch of tools.


Persistence
----------

If `/mnt/toolbox` exists,
toolbox will persist installed packages and system changes
by using methods that already exist in arch.

* [Alpine Local Backup](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup)
  is pre-configured to use `/mnt/toolbox/lbu`.
* [Local APK cache](https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Local_APK_cache)
  is pre-configured to use `/mnt/toolbox/apk`.

It's important to `lbu` that your machine have a hostname.
If you change hostnames,
you will need to rename files in `/mnt/toolbox/lbu`.

```
podman run \
  --hostname toolbox \
  --volume /path/to/toolbox:/mnt/toolbox \
  git.woozle.org/neale/toolbox
```


First Run
---------

You may want to `podman exec` into the container,
in order to edit `/etc/doas.conf`
set up user accounts,
and/or install ssh `authorized_keys`.

Once set up,
you should be able to ssh in for most of your needs.


Podman vs Docker
----------------

On my diskless Raspberry Pi,
Podman takes half as much space on the RAM disk as Docker.
So I use Podman.

You do you.
If you like docker better, just type `docker` instead of `podman`.



Why This Exists
---------------

I run my home server in Alpine's "diskless mode".
The Raspberry Pi uses a MicroSD card,
which will "wear out" after many writes.
This means my system runs entirely in RAM.

Once my home server is up,
it mounts a 12TB btrfs array.
So I run a bunch of containers backed by the disk.

Running a more robust installation in a container
allows me to use my magnetic storage for the larger system,
and install and remove packages when I like,
without worrying about wearing out the MicroSD card.


Shout Out
---------

Alpine Linux is cool.
It provides all the difficult parts of this,
I just had to set up some config files.

The really cool part is that my container works the same way as the host it runs on!