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Tools and packages

System packages come from pacman, in the image. Dev tools come from mise, in the home. Each has a way to add more that survives a rebuild.

System packages (pacman, in the image)

Everything the common-no-omarchy config and try/proj call (zsh, tmux, mise, gum, starship, zoxide, fzf, eza, bat, ripgrep, fd, lazygit, jq, neovim, luarocks, tree-sitter-cli), the base (tailscale, rsync, base-devel, gh, yazi, ...), the database clients psql and mariadb (see databases.md), the network basics dig, nslookup, nc, whois and traceroute (devbox dev-env network for nmap, tcpdump and the rest) and rootless podman (see containers.md).

  • Update Arch: rebuild the container, docker compose build --pull --no-cache && docker compose up -d, or docker compose pull && docker compose up -d when the box runs the published image.
  • A sudo pacman -S inside the box is lost on rebuild. Add the package to the Dockerfile for good, or let devbox pkg (or devbox tui, for the catalogue) put it back at every start.

Terminal apps

devbox tui is a catalogue of terminal apps worth having at hand, none of them installed until you ask: btop, htop, ncdu, lazydocker, k9s, dive, atac, rainfrog, pgcli, jless, visidata, tealdeer, glow, fastfetch, hyperfine, gping, trippy, termshark and slk. Every one but slk is a pacman package present on Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM, and the install goes through devbox pkg, so the app comes back after a rebuild. slk, a Slack client (getslk.sh), is not packaged by Arch: its latest GitHub release, checked against its checksums, goes into ~/.local/bin, which lives in the home and survives a rebuild too. devbox tui slk again updates it.

slk signs in through the Slack desktop app, which the box does not have, so devbox tui slk --login signs it in from your browser session instead:

  1. Open https://app.slack.com in your browser and sign in.
  2. DevTools, Network tab, filter on api/, click a channel, then right click one of the requests, Copy, Copy as cURL (bash).
  3. Run devbox tui slk --login and paste it.

The copied command carries both halves of the session: the xoxc- token and the d cookie, which no console script can read since it is HttpOnly. The bare xoxc- token can be pasted instead, the d cookie is then asked for. The pair is checked with Slack, then written to ~/.local/share/slk/tokens/<team id>.json. Nothing refreshes it without the desktop app: when Slack ends that browser session, run --login again.

devbox tui --list            # the catalogue, installed ones marked
devbox tui btop atac         # install
devbox tui --remove btop     # remove, and forget
devbox tui                   # menu: install or remove, then tick the apps

devbox tui --list in the box: the catalogue of terminal apps with a one line description each, the installed one marked with a star

lazydocker only makes sense with rootless podman on (PODMAN_ENABLE=true). What is already in the image stays out of the list: lazygit, yazi, fzf, bat, eza, ripgrep, fd, jq, gum, tmux and neovim. Anything else from the Arch repositories goes through devbox pkg add or the fuzzy picker of devbox pkg install.

Persistent packages

devbox pkg is the middle ground between a bare sudo pacman -S, which is gone at the next rebuild, and an edit to the Dockerfile, which means a commit and a rebuild. It installs the package and writes its name into ~/.config/dev-box/packages, which lives in the persistent home.

devbox pkg                        # menu: add, install, drop, list or restore
devbox pkg add ripgrep-all htop   # install, and remember
devbox pkg list                   # the list, and whether each one is there
devbox pkg install                # fuzzy picker over the Arch repositories
devbox pkg drop htop              # uninstall, and forget
devbox pkg restore                # put back whatever is missing

At every start the entrypoint reads that list and reinstalls what the image does not have, in the background, without holding up the login. The log line is [dev-box] pkg: N package(s) reinstalled.

Only packages come back. A config file you edited by hand in /etc, a systemd unit, a file dropped in /usr/local/bin: none of that is tracked, and none of it survives. The durable answer stays the Dockerfile in the repository.

Dev tools (mise)

Dev tools live in the persistent home, declared in ~/.config/mise/config.toml (a seeded file, see customization.md):

  • node (LTS)
  • shellcheck (aqua:koalaman/shellcheck, the lint of the scripts)

No coding agent is installed by default. claude (Claude Code, aqua:anthropics/claude-code), pi (aqua:earendil-works/pi), omp (github:can1357/oh-my-pi, via mise's github backend), codex (OpenAI Codex CLI, aqua:openai/codex) and opencode each have a wrapper in /usr/local/bin, which installs the tool on its first call: when mise cannot find the command, it runs mise use -g <tool>, which adds the tool to ~/.config/mise/config.toml, then mise x <tool> -- <cmd>. Once installed, the mise shims and activation run the tool directly. An installed tool is never upgraded by its wrapper: mise use -g <tool> without a version reuses the installed one. So a box only carries the agents it uses, and one removed from the config comes back on its next call. devbox mise-install writes the same kind of wrapper for any other tool, see customization.md.

The declared tools are installed in the background on first start. Follow progress with tail -f ~/.cache/dev-box-install.log. Later starts only reinstall what is missing (MISE_INSTALL_ON_START), and never bump a version. Upgrading is explicit: devbox update tools runs mise install then mise upgrade. Add more on demand, for example mise use -g go@latest, or a whole language with devbox dev-env. Set GITHUB_TOKEN, no scopes needed, to avoid GitHub API rate limits.