Distrobox containers disappear on reboot

1

I have an application that I need to run in an ubuntu distrobox. I can create the distrobox and run it fine, but when I reboot, any created distroboxes are gone. I end up having to re-create it from scratch every time.

I’ve tried both creating them imperatively (putting distrobox in systemPackages) as well as using the home-manager module, but they disappear in both cases. In the home-manager module case, I’m not even sure how to force a container rebuild without doing a whole system rebuild (restarting distrobox-home-manager.service doesn’t do anything).

I am using docker backend.

I haven’t been able to figure out why I’m getting this behavior and searching hasn’t produce any other posts about this. Is this just a result of nixos not persisting containers, or is there a configuration error that I can fix?

2

That’s weird, my containers are still there when I reboot (created by distrobox or not). And I don’t even have distrobox installed in my system packages, I use it on the fly with Nix shell.

Do you use impermanence? Could you show your Nix docker configuration?

3

I don’t use Impermanence. this is all I have for docker config, which I believe I copied from the wiki at some point:

virtualisation.docker = {
      enable = true;
      enableOnBoot = true;
      autoPrune.enable = true;
    };

Looking at it now, do you think autoPrune could be the culprit?

4

Indeed, autoPrune is the culprit here.

In the service implementation, there’s three units involved:

  • the docker service, which runs the main service
  • the docker-prune service, which runs the pruning
  • the docker-prune timer, which runs on a weekly basis (by default, with autoPrune.dates)

docker-prune is configured to start after docker has started, using the After= systemd directive.

Since you set enableOnBoot, the docker service starts on boot, and effectively triggers the docker-prune service.

The pruning uses docker system prune -f, which can be configured with the --filter flag to exclude some containers from being pruned.

If you want to keep the autoPrune option, you can set this flag in virtualisation.docker.autoPrune.flags.

5

Thanks, I’ll just disable it for now and see how it goes.