prenv

portable reproducible environments for Linux applications

What is prenv?

prenv is a tool that allows regular users to deploy applications in a portable and reproducible way.

prenv does not require root privileges to be installed or used. The focus of prenv is to provide a tool that can be used to run applications in a reproducible way, without the need to install dependencies on the host system.

prenv does NOT aim to provide full isolation between environemtns and the host, for such kind case please consider using Docker or Podman.

Which applications can I run with prenv?

Currently you can run applications available to install from the following distributions:

The Linux images are sourced from https://linuxcontainers.org/ and are based on the official images from the respective distributions.

System Requirements

• Linux or WSL2 (Kernel version >=4.18)
• Python 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11

How to install

pip install prenv

How to use

List all the distributions available from the LXC project

# Check the list of supported distro names in the table above
prenv lxc list

Run an in-memory single run container

Run a shell in an Alpine Linux container

prenv run alpine:3.17

Check the apk version:

prenv run alpine:3.17 "apk --version"

Create an in-memory multi run container

prenv create alpine:3.17

Execute a command in a container

prenv execute alpine:3.17 "apk --version"