Please, guys, I beg of you: even if you're going to let LLMs generate whole wheel-reinventing GitHub repositories for you (I've let them generate many!), at least write your Hacker News posts yourself. The ability to write a Hacker News post without LLM assistance non-trivially relates to the ability to develop good software, because it boils down to skills conceptualising the project in a way that makes sense to humans, such that the project is product-shaped, rather than loose-blob-of-proper-nouns shaped. It's just very difficult to invest trust in a piece of software doing the right thing when it's not clear someone on the other end has enough ability to express their own ends in writing to make clear what that right thing is.
If your mental model is "run my image instead of docker run," this won't fit. If it's "run untrusted or ephemeral workloads with stronger, auditable isolation on a single host," that's the target.
This is neat! Is it rootless? Could it pair with devenv?
I've just gone down a rabbit hole with Fedora atomic desktop (Kinoite), Flatpak Zed, devcontainers with podman compose using the Debian container and nix feature, and devenv.
It allows me to keep an immutable OS while still having an infrastructure as code development experience. Also team members on MacOS or Windows can choose to use devcontainers to wrap devenv or just skip devcontainers and the extra isolation. It's pretty portable.
Side note: Unfortunately VSCode devcontainers aren't open source and do not work with VSCodium. Upvote if you'd like VSCode devcontainers open sourced. [1] This example should still work with VSCode though. And the devcontainer CLI.
Also, Zed has some issues around Podman and SELinux with an open PR. [2] And unfortunately Podman Compose does not currently work with Flatpak Zed. [3]
In Zed to enable Podman, add the following to Zed 'settings.json':
After this you can work within a podman container, connect to adjacent compose services, and use nix and devenv. If a collaborator wants to skip containers they can just run devenv locally. Though I think devcontainers running devenv is actually the easier route provided that they are setup and working on your OS.
And this all works pretty much out of the box without root on an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite.
Very cool to see more security focused tools being built here for the Nix ecosystem. What were some of the biggest roadblocks or challenges you hit when building this?
Please, guys, I beg of you: even if you're going to let LLMs generate whole wheel-reinventing GitHub repositories for you (I've let them generate many!), at least write your Hacker News posts yourself. The ability to write a Hacker News post without LLM assistance non-trivially relates to the ability to develop good software, because it boils down to skills conceptualising the project in a way that makes sense to humans, such that the project is product-shaped, rather than loose-blob-of-proper-nouns shaped. It's just very difficult to invest trust in a piece of software doing the right thing when it's not clear someone on the other end has enough ability to express their own ends in writing to make clear what that right thing is.
This is neat! Is it rootless? Could it pair with devenv?
I've just gone down a rabbit hole with Fedora atomic desktop (Kinoite), Flatpak Zed, devcontainers with podman compose using the Debian container and nix feature, and devenv.
It allows me to keep an immutable OS while still having an infrastructure as code development experience. Also team members on MacOS or Windows can choose to use devcontainers to wrap devenv or just skip devcontainers and the extra isolation. It's pretty portable.
Yes it's rootless and can pair with devenv. MacOS is unfortunately not supported because seccomp is not available.
>>> devcontainers with podman compose using the Debian container and nix feature, and devenv.
Can you expand on that please?
Sure!
Side note: Unfortunately VSCode devcontainers aren't open source and do not work with VSCodium. Upvote if you'd like VSCode devcontainers open sourced. [1] This example should still work with VSCode though. And the devcontainer CLI.
Also, Zed has some issues around Podman and SELinux with an open PR. [2] And unfortunately Podman Compose does not currently work with Flatpak Zed. [3]
In Zed to enable Podman, add the following to Zed 'settings.json':
Then we're just mostly following the guide:https://containers.dev/guide/dockerfile
Create '.devcontainer/devcontainer.json':
Then create '.devcontainer/docker-compose.yml': And lastly create 'devenv.nix': On Linux with SELinux, until the PR [2] is merged, a workaround for Zed needs to be applied: After this you can work within a podman container, connect to adjacent compose services, and use nix and devenv. If a collaborator wants to skip containers they can just run devenv locally. Though I think devcontainers running devenv is actually the easier route provided that they are setup and working on your OS.And this all works pretty much out of the box without root on an immutable OS like Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite.
---
[1](https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/11...)
[2](https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58500)
[3](https://github.com/flathub/dev.zed.Zed/pull/342#issuecomment...)
Very cool to see more security focused tools being built here for the Nix ecosystem. What were some of the biggest roadblocks or challenges you hit when building this?
> rootfs attestation verifies a per-file SHA-256 manifest at startup;
What threat model does this protect against? Certainly nice, especially for free, but wondering about utility.
it's a simple integrity check for catching deployment drift/tampering.
Isn't it the same as using systemd-nspawn? containers.<name> let you declare containers with nspawn. What's the difference?
my main reason for building this is gvisor/seccomp/capability/landlock
I'm curious if Linux aarch64 would be difficult to support with this.
pretty cool but docker support is a no-brainer. not having it is a deal-breaker