[Discussion] Does a distrobox container have access to your host systems root dirs /... and /home/... and other folders without being mounted?

[Rashnan]

Does/Should a distrobox container have access to your systems root dirs /... and /home/... and other folders?
I want to create an isolated container with general ubuntu tools like curl and ninja, g++ etc. installed. I dont want any buildtools or dev build / cache files to be on my main system.

Alternatives:
Making a custom image with podman took too much effort and I kept running into terminal tty issues where my agents inside this dev environment would just crash when running commands. The commands themselves are valid, and work inside the container.
I would prefer not making a full VM since I dont need too much tooling, just a few to handle python and typescript development.

How is this related to distrobox:
Distrobox runs uses podman under the hood and from the create commands I inspected, it should only mount the specified $HOME dir and few other files. I assumed this would mean it is an isolated fs in general. However your docs also describe containers as tightly integrated with host implying it may be less isolated. You also have commands that allow running processes on host which points towards this as well. And ls / would give me the host /

My issue:
I created an ubuntu box, through distroshelf then specified a custom home dir inside my Desktop. Then i ran a script which does a lot of package installs. I then noticed the bin dirs and settings dirs for some of those packages where in my host machines home? not in my specified home dir. ex: $HOME/.local/bin

Describe the solution you'd like:
Just want to know whether the box created should be able to access folders on system outside of those explicitly mounted via the volume mounts or the specified custom $HOME dir. Is this expected behaviour or a bug?

Additional info:
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://qwen-code-assets.oss-cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/installation/install-qwen.sh)"
from https://github.com/QwenLM/qwen-code (the install script i ran)
I noticed it installed nvm and npm and saw .npm and .nvm in my host home like: $HOME/.npm and $HOME/.nvm.
The box was created using distroshelf 1.4.8, distrobox 1.8.2.4, OS is bazzite release 43.

[balanza]

Distrobox mounts the host's $HOME as the container home dir; this is what allows your installed packages to interact with the work directories and vice versa. Of course, installing packages that assume a per-user configuration (i.e. ~/.npm) will read and write the host's home dir.
You can also mount a custom home dir, if it makes sense to you https://distrobox.it/useful_tips/#create-a-distrobox-with-a-custom-home-directory.

However, Distrobox is not a sandbox; thus, if that is your objective, it might not be the right tool.

[Rashnan]

I had specified a custom home dir, so I wonder why installing packages wrote to the host users home dir. That and if mounting the host home was all it did, doing a ls / should not reveal host machines root. That and if I specified a custom home dir, I expect the normal host home dir to not be mounted into the box, but I could see it when I did ls /home (inside box).
Is this a bug?
I want to get a full picture on what parts of created boxes are connected to host and see if I can compromise on complete isolation.

[stateless]

Check this #531

[arijit1begins]

https://dev.to/arijit1begins/dbxsmith-forge-isolated-dev-environments-and-manage-boxes-seamlessly-4god - Check this

Repo: https://github.com/arijit1begins/dbx-smith

[arijit1begins]

check this out : https://dev.to/arijit1begins/dbxsmith-forge-isolated-dev-environments-and-manage-boxes-seamlessly-4god