Booting local builds

In some scenarios, you may want to boot a locally built container image, in order to apply a persistent hotfix to a specific server, or as part of a development/testing scenario.

Building a new local image

At the current time, the bootc host container storage is distinct from that of the podman container runtime storage (default configuration in /var/lib/containers).

It not currently streamlined to export the booted host container storage into the podman storage.

Hence today, to replicate the exact container image the host has booted, take the container image referenced in bootc status and turn it into a podman pull invocation.

Next, craft a container build file with your desired changes:

FROM <image>
RUN apt|dnf upgrade https://example.com/systemd-hotfix.package

Copying an updated image into the bootc storage

This command is straightforward; we just need to tell bootc to fetch updates from containers-storage, which is the local "application" container runtime (podman) storage:

$ bootc switch --transport containers-storage quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:40

From there, the new image will be queued for the next boot and a reboot will apply it.

For more on valid transports, see containers-transports.