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host-spawn

Run commands on your host machine from inside your flatpak sandbox, toolbox or distrobox containers.

Originally started as a reimplementation of flatpak-spawn --host.

Recommended setup

Note: Distrobox already ships with host-spawn. You might be better served by using their wrapper distrobox-host-exec which runs host-spawn under the hood.

  • Install host-spawn in a location visible only to the container. I recommend /usr/local/bin.
  • Make sure it is executable with chmod +x host-spawn

How to use

  • host-spawn with no argument will open a shell on your host.
  • host-spawn command... will run the command on your host.

Run host-spawn -h for more options.

Creating shims for host binaries

If there's a process that you always want to execute on the host system, you can create a symlink to it somewhere in your $PATH and it'll always be executed through host-spawn.

Example of creating a shim for the flatpak command:

# Inside your container:

$ flatpak --version
zsh: command not found: flatpak

# Have host-spawn handle any flatpak command
$ ln -s /usr/local/bin/host-spawn /usr/local/bin/flatpak

# Now flatpak will always be executed on the host
$ flatpak --version
Flatpak 1.12.7

Note: you will want to store the symlink in a location visible only to the container, to avoid an infinite loop. If you are using toolbox/distrobox, this means anywhere outside your home directory. I recommend /usr/local/bin.

Improvements over flatpak-spawn --host