dev-container

Immutable dev environment for distrobox. Same image, same tools, any Linux PC.

Prerequisites

• podman
• distrobox
• Existing dotfiles in ~/dotfiles (stow-managed) hosts $HOME is mounted into the container, so your existing symlinks just work.

First-time setup on a machine

podman login ghcr.io        # once per machine (use a PAT with read:packages)
make create                 # pulls image, creates distrobox "devcon"
make enter

Bumping the image

Edit Containerfile, bump TAG in Makefile and image= in distrobox.ini, then:

make build push   # or: push to main and let GH Actions build it
make rebuild      # tear down + recreate locally

Pinning to a digest (strictest immutability)

After pushing, grab the pullable digest reference with:

make digest
# ghcr.io/itsachance/dev-container@sha256:4f8e...bc21

Paste that full string into distrobox.ini as the image= value:

image=ghcr.io/itsachance/dev-container@sha256:4f8e...bc21

Every PC then pulls byte-for-byte the same image. If make digest says "push first", run make push and try again.

Targets

target	what it does
build	build image locally
push	push to GHCR
login	podman login ghcr.io
create	distrobox assemble create --file distrobox.ini
delete	distrobox rm -f devcon
rebuild	delete + create
enter	distrobox enter devcon
digest	print pinnable image@sha256:… reference