My workflow is basically that instead of installing all dependencies for a project, I run a container with what I need that is usually removed immediately after execution.

As an example I recently wanted to compile minikube from source. To compile the project I would need to have go installed as well as make, and since I don’t have any of those tools installed to my base system I used the official golang container from dockerhub.

Compilation is then run with podman run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/usr/src/minikube:Z -w /usr/src/minikube golang:latest make which simply mounts the project and compiles it using make, and since the entire project folder was mounted in the container any binaries and other output can be found in the configured output directories on the host.

If I have any project I have to run or compile often inside of a container I can easily create an alias or function in my shell to run the podman run command for that project.

I like this workflow a lot since it keeps my host system clean, and it makes it easy for me to build projects with different dependencies with little to no conflicts. I much prefer this over toolbox since I don’t have to consider the state of my toolbox container and images are always updated to their latest version without any need to manually keep packages inside the toolbox up to date.

I might do a more thorough write up of my workflow on my blog in the future and if I’m satisfied with it I’ll probably post it here as well.