Distrobox

Because of its image-based nature, AstrOS does not ship with a package manager on the host. Anything that is neither available as a Flatpak nor a system extension usually belongs in a Distrobox container.

Creating your first container

Running distrobox enter with no arguments creates and enters a default container.

You can create more advanced containers with distrobox-create.

Tip: use --home to select a custom HOME directory for the container.

Installing software inside a container

Once you are inside, use whatever package manager the image ships. This is pacman and yay for our own default image.

Exporting apps and binaries to the host

You can use distrobox-export for this.

Example:

distrobox-export --app coolapp

Distrobox Assemble

distrobox-assemble takes care of creating or destroying containers in batches, based on a manifest file. The manifest file by default is ./distrobox.ini, but can be specified using the --file flag.

Example:

[astros]
additional_packages="fastfetch btop"
image=docker.io/astroslinux/distrobox-container
replace=true
pull=true
exported_apps="btop"

Bring it up:

distrobox assemble create

You may want to see our own distrobox.ini, which we use for developing AstrOS.