mashru3

mashru3 (مشروع) provides the command workspace, which sets up isolated environments driven by guix environment. It is essentially just glue code on top of guix and conductor.

A common workflow would look like this:

# Create new workspace and enter it
cd `workspace create my new fancy workspace`
# Add some code
$EDITOR hello.R
# Run rstudio inside container (needs psychnotebook-app-rstudio)
workspace run rstudio

It’s also possible to share a workspace with users on the same machine by running

workspace share janeuser

which would grant the group janeuser read access to the folder via ACL’s. -w allows writing as well, but be careful with that.

Then janeuser can copy the entire workspace with exactly the same Guix environment:

workspace copy ~joeuser/my_new_fancy_workspace janescopy

It’s also possible to install packages into the workspace:

workspace package modify -- -coreutils +which

This removes coreutils and installs which.

Internals

Workspaces are simply directories with a certain structure. They contain

1. their own copy of Guix

2. a Guix channel description (~/.config/guix/channels.scm), pinning it to a fixed commit and a manifest with installed packages (~/.config/guix/manifest.scm)

3. metadata (~/.config/workspace.yaml). The following fields are currently in use:

   version

   Metadata version, currently 1.

   _id

   Unique ID for the workspace. Makes sure a project can be tracked regardless of its location on the filesystem.

   created

   Date and time the workspace was initially created.

   modified

   Date and time the workspace was modified last.

   creator

   String identifying the user who initially created the workspace.

   name

   Name or title for the workspace.

   description

   Long description text for the workspace.

Applications drop a freedesktop-compliant .desktop file into one of the XDG_DATA_DIRS, usually ~/.guix-profile/share/applications, but ~/.local/share/applications for user-supplied applications is supported as well. If the program has a web interface it must be proxied through conductor, which is indicated by the interface org.leibniz-psychology.org.conductor.vX specified in the .desktop file. Version 1 requires commands to accept the argument -s <socketpath> and listen on socketpath.

workspace run spawns a Guix container (i.e. Linux namespace) and mounts the workspace directory as homedir of the fake user joeuser. Note that the UID 1000 must exist on the host system.