Track homebrew's state inside bluefin-cli

[castrojo]

It'd be nice to destroy and assemble the bluefin-cli container without losing all the packages I've installed inside. Jeefy has an idea on how to do this.

[jeefy]

We CANNOT use $USER and must use explicit naming. For this, it's jeefy and we're using wolfi distrobox

• On first boot we make a folder named /home/jeefy/.homebrew
• On first boot we create a file (/etc/homebrew/brew.env) upon first-boot that contains the following:

HOMEBREW_PREFIX=/home/jeefy/.homebrew
HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY=/home/jeefy/.homebrew

From then on, any brew command will reference/install/use the mounted user's home directory. Example output after doing that and running brew install go

📦[jeefy@bluefin ~]$ brew config
HOMEBREW_VERSION: >=4.1.0 (shallow or no git repository)
...
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /home/jeefy/.homebrew
HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY: /home/jeefy/.homebrew
HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /home/jeefy/.homebrew/Cellar
HOMEBREW_CASK_OPTS: []
HOMEBREW_DISPLAY: :1
HOMEBREW_EDITOR: /usr/bin/nano
HOMEBREW_MAKE_JOBS: 16
HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE: set
Homebrew Ruby: 3.1.4 => /usr/bin/ruby
...
📦[jeefy@bluefin ~]$ brew ls
go
📦[jeefy@bluefin ~]$

In #745 I add a on-start script just for the DX Bluefin variant, and I'd suggest putting another on-start script in to handle this.

[m2Giles]

I think we could use Distrobox's ability to mount volumes at specified locations.

If the workflow for creating this container is going to happen via assemble file (or just command), we could make .homebrew inside the user's home folder via skel and then mount that to /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew.

[jeefy]

That's another decent approach! My one nit on that is it's (essentially) double-mounting the same folder. If we had to trick brew, that's the approach I'd go, but this is something we can configure instead.

[m2Giles]

I've been trying to use the brew.env and it seems to pull in a ton of additional packages compared to using the default /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew. Additionally, it wants to compile basically everything locally as well. This also seems to fail quite a bit. This was a pretty off experience for me and I think its due to the fact that we are missing most of the brew preinstalled scripts /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew.

Everything seems to be in the Cellar. Having just that be linked into the /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew will have every package tracked. But they are unlinked when recreating the container. Manually relinking them sorta works, but somethings will require a reinstall (but it's already on disk so it's relatively fast).

But basically, on container enter. Make symlink between $HOME/.homebrew/Cellar and /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew. Relink if necessary. Reinstall if necessary. The making a symlink can be done from bash_profile or whatnot. The relink could have a convenience script on the container. The reinstall I have no idea how to catch.

And symlinks are not recommended for Cellar. It needs to be an actual Directory. So I'm back to volume mounting just the Cellar now.

[m2Giles]

This is now complete and works with no additional arguments during container creation.