Re: Running IceCat in a container

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Mike,

Mike Gerwitz <address@hidden> skribis:

> I'm running IceCat in a container, with the goal of isolating it form
> the rest of my system as much as possible without running a full
> VM.  Here's what I have so far:
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC sh
> guix environment \
>      --container \
>      --network \
>      -r "$gc_root" \
>      --share=/tmp/.X11-unix/ \
>      --expose=/etc/machine-id \
>      --share=$HOME/.mozilla/ \
>      --share=$HOME/.cache/mozilla/ \
>      --share=$HOME/.Xauthority \
>      --share=$HOME/Downloads/icecat-container/=$HOME/Downloads/ \
>      --ad-hoc icecat coreutils
>      -- \
>      env DISPLAY="$DISPLAY" icecat "$@"
> #+END_SRC

I’ve been dreaming of having it baked in into the shell (like Plash did;
we could write a Bash or Guile-Bash extension) or something along these
lines…

> The most difficult problem I'm having is dealing with
> fonts.  Specifically, I want to share the system fonts
> (/run/current-system/profile/share/fonts).  The problem is, I can't just
> expose that directory, because it symlinks into the store, and those
> derivations don't exist within the container.
>
>   - I do not want to expose all of /gnu.
>   - I can provide the fonts as inputs to the environment, but I do not
>     want to have to run fc-cache every time I start the container,
>     because that is very slow.  Exposing the cache directory doesn't
>     help since the derivation used in the container ($GUIX_ENVIRONMENT)
>     always appears to be different than the font derivation used on my
>     system, and also by my user.
>   - I don't want to expose my user's entire ~/.guix-profile/.
>
> I'm making things difficult for myself because I want as little
> shared/exposed with the container as possible.
>
> To complicate things further, for privacy, I don't want my user exposed
> to the container via the name of my home directory; Guix creates that
> automatically.  I haven't yet looked at the code to see what exactly it
> does.

“guix environment -C” makes $PWD shared; if you do (cd /tmp; guix
environment -C …), then /tmp is shared but not $HOME.

> Is there a reasonable solution here?  Should I create a separate user
> entirely and then just share the entire home directory?  I'm not sure
> how that might impact X11 socket sharing, though.  Can I maybe
> pre-create an image, already having run fc-cache, and run that image as
> a container (like one would with Docker?)?  But that wouldn't solve my
> user privacy issue.

Perhaps you could define a package that simply runs “fc-cache” with the
fonts it has as inputs, and then pass that to ‘guix environment’.

But really, we should make a specific tool for this.

Thoughts?

Ludo’.