mimchine

well-integrated mini-machines; a portable linux that has all your data dirs mounted. inspired by distrobox and powered by podman.

what it's about

sometimes, i want a linux terminal development environment on macos, and i want all my data magically linked in. so that i can cd to a source directory and seamlessly build it.

with the power of containers, we can do just that. we run a linux userspace of our choice (fully customizable by a dockerfile), and mount in all our directories.

mimchine makes the above super easy. just build a machine image, create a container, then run mimchine shell and you're in!

setup

linux

should be all good to go

macos

ensure podman machine is initialized as such:

podman machine init --volume /Users --volume /Volumes
podman machine stop && ulimit -n unlimited && podman machine start

usage

sync project environment

uv sync

build a mimchine image

uv run mimchine build -f ./demo/mim_fed_demo.docker -n mim_fed_demo

create a mimchine

uv run mimchine create -n mim_fed_demo -H ~/Downloads

export an image

uv run mimchine export -n mim_fed -o ~/Downloads/mim_fed.tar.zst

import an image

uv run mimchine import -i ~/Downloads/mim_fed.tar.zst

open a shell in a mimchine

uv run mimchine shell -c mim_fed_demo

destroy a mimchine

uv run mimchine destroy -c mim_fed_demo -f