wine-container

OCI Container for Wine (or Codeweaver's Crossover) using Buildah and Podman.

Many old but useful Windows apps are probably poorly maintained or patched. Others that, while newer, are potentially buggy or have security issues. One solution is to run those apps in a container. That is the point of this project.

Goals

• Use Podman (rootless) to limit breakout attacks.
• All data is written to a volume and, except the sockets for X11 and PulseAudio, the containers has no access to the underlying filesystem.
• Allow Windows apps to be orchestrated as a part of a collection of containers.
• Support Codeweaver's Crossover in addition to Wine.

Documentation and Usage

Building and running are facilitated by two scripts: build_wine_container and run_wine_container. Each script offers help in the usual way, for example:

build_wine_container --help

Assuming you want to use this project to run CrappyWindowsApp, you could do the following:

build_wine_container -d CrappyHomeVolume -f -n CrappyWindowsApp
run_wine_container -d CrappyHomeVolume -n CrappyWindowsApp -r <path_to_crappy_app>/crappyapp.exe

The first line above will create a volume named CrappyHomeVolume and an OCI container named CrappyWindowsApp. The second line will run the app in the new container.

The volume is stored on the container host in ~/.local/share/containers/storage/volumes/$HOME_VOLUME/_data. The build script automatically makes this directory writable from the user that launched Podman so you can copy/rename/delete files from the host.

Platforms

This project should work correctly on any recent Linux distribution. I currently use Fedora (F35 Silverblue and Kinoite) , so this platform is well tested by me.

Dependencies

• Buildah
• Podman

Contributing

I would love suggestions, fixes, documentation, examples, and other contributions. See CONTRIBUTING and CODE_OF_CONDUCT for details.

See CONTRIBUTORS for a list of contributors.