[tlug] Dent: Persistent Interactive Dockerized Linux Systems

["Curt J. Sampson" <cjs@example.com>]

Doing a quick search back through the archives, I don't think I've
mentioned this here before, though I don't see how I never did. Anyway, I
created and maintain a package called dent[1] which allows one to quickly
bring up a separate "Linux system" (using your distribution or most any
other) that you can play around in interactively. I find this handy for
things like:

- Bringing up an instance of another distro to check versions and behaviour
  of its programs and packages.
- Interactive tests of my software on other distros.
- Having a workspace shared with others that's isolated from my personal
  system (i.e., not having access to my private files, keys, etc.). (This
  also allows me to give people `sudo` access without worrying about them
  doing bad things to my system.)

One of the key tricks that makes this work well is that your user is
re-created in the container with the same uid and name so that you can
share (read-only or read-write) directories from your host into the
container. This lets me do builds and things within a container differently
configured from my host while still using Git etc. in the host to push and
pull stuff.

Dent is a Python package[2] that can easily be installed and run with pip
or pipx or whatever, so it's pretty trivial to install.

If anybody's interested in using this sort of thing, well, there it is, and
if anybody's interesting in helping to improve it, that would be _very_
welcome. I've got a moderately long list of improvements I'd like to see,
particularly configuration files that let you have a lot more control over
shared dirs, what packages are automatically installed in the container,
and so on.

[1]: https://github.com/cynic-net/dent
[2]: https://pypi.org/project/dent/

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch