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What is really happening in a terminal when a container or environment is launched? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by j4k3@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I really want to make a bashrc function that I can call from the Gnome Terminal that will cd into a directory, then enter a distrobox container, then enter a conda environment, then launch a python script. (doing AI stuff and have many coexisting dependencies), I want a function because I would like to pass arguments to alter all 3 levels.

The distrobox "-- commands" doesn't seem to work for this. Like these commands do not launch inside the terminal that called distrobox. I need the output of these commands in the original terminal, and I need the visual confirmation that each command has run correctly like the conda (env)user$ I typically get for running conda activate and the PS1 changes I have setup for each distrobox container. How can I run a bash function/script that emulates the behavior of the Gnome Terminal when a user enters each of these commands sequentially?

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[–] taaz@biglemmowski.win 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It sounds like your main problem is that distrobox somehow eats up the output of the commands run in it? Maybe you are missing some other switch then.
I am assuming the --commands switch does actually run the commands, but does not show the outputs.

Usually when distrobox takes over the terminal as you describe it, it could be boiled down to "taking over" the terminal's stdin, stdout and stderr which your GUI terminal app/emulator thenr renders out. (What actually probably happens is that distrobox calls docker run with -it switches which allocate a pseudo-TTY, basically another terminal - keep in mind these terminals or ttys in other words are not the same as [usually] graphical terminal emulators).

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I started looking into this a few days ago but got nowhere. I think you are right about the pseudo terminal. I was thinking there must be a way to capture the ID of the original terminal and pass the distrobox commands back to it. Maybe it would be possible by passing the distrobox container a variable at launch and making that variable a named pipe, but like, I barely know named pipes are a thing and didn't manage to get it working using a script or function call in the distroboxrc file. I tried making a bunch of different things in this file, like making a startup loop to launch stuff, but none of them worked either.

[–] Discover5164@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

have you looked into direnv?

i'm not sure it's the right tool for you, but it may give you some ideas

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I haven't heard of it before, but I just read its page on the Arch wiki. I definitely have a use for that one to assign CUDA variables.

Still, I would like to better understand what is really happening in the gnome terminal and emulate its behavior

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you provide the exact command you're using? I don't have Distrobox installed at the moment to test, but theoretically distrobox-enter [container_name] -- your command here should work, but I also see there is a distrobox-host-exec "your command here" option (docs here) that I've yet to try, perhaps that will do the trick?

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

So I have containers and conda environments for Oobabooga, KoboldAI, Automatic 1111, ComfiUI, as GUIs, and separate CLI setups for Tortoise TTS, Selero, privateGPT, Langchain agents, and a couple of setups for additional CLI tools and a database. Most of these talk to each other over local host. Some of them like Oobabooga, I open every day and it just gets tedious. I have run the alias oobabooga="cd ~/foo/bar && distrobox enter foobar -- uname -n && conda activate baz && python ./baz.py" that can work but it is static and it doesn't always activate the conda environment correctly. I think this may be due to how long it can take for the distrobox container to activate. The uname -n helps a bit and is the only visual indicator I managed to get working to show me that I am in the distrobox, but it flies above the output quickly and if the program exits in error, my PS1 variable is not changed so I don't have my usual indicator that I am in a container. Overall, this can launch the script, but that is not what I am asking about or trying to achieve. I want the same visual indicators and clear execution as running each command sequentially in the terminal from a function or script.