whatwedo iac-shell

shell in a container with tools for managing our infrastructure:

• ansible
• molecule (ansible testing)
• prettier, yamllint, ...

Requirements

• podman

Setup

Clone the repository, then source source.sh from your local clone:

git clone https://github.com/whatwedo/iac-shell.git ~/git/whatwedo/iac-shell.git
source ~/git/whatwedo/iac-shell.git/source.sh

Any path works — ~/git/whatwedo/iac-shell.git as an example

To get the iac command in every shell, add the source line to your ~/.bashrc:

echo 'source ~/git/whatwedo/iac-shell.git/source.sh' >> ~/.bashrc

Keep it up to date with:

git -C ~/git/whatwedo/iac-shell.git pull

Usage

iac opens the shell. Your current directory is mounted at /workspace inside it, so run it from the repository you want to work on:

cd ~/git/whatwedo/some-infra-repo
iac

Pass --pull to fetch the latest image before starting:

iac --pull

Arguments after -- are passed straight through to podman run.

Tools

Containers (podman / docker)

The host's rootless podman socket is forwarded into the container, so both the podman and docker CLIs work inside the shell — they are thin clients driving the host's podman (which serves a Docker-API-compatible endpoint on the same socket). Nothing runs a container engine daemon inside the shell.

podman ps          # host podman
docker ps          # same host podman, via the Docker API
docker compose up  # docker-compose-plugin is installed

DOCKER_HOST / CONTAINER_HOST both point at the forwarded socket, and it is also symlinked to /var/run/docker.sock for tools that hardcode that path.

Helper Commands

go: does ssh and sudo su - in one single command, usage: go my-server

Open Source ❤️

We love whatwedo — a software studio in Bern, Switzerland, fighting the good fight against bad software. But here's the thing: we also love open source.

Curious what else we've been building in the open? → github.com/whatwedo