[guide] How to run Netbird inside of distrobox

[Darin755]

Apologies if this is not a good place for this. I didn't know where else to put it. This is a guide on how to get the Netbird agent working inside Podman based Distrobox containers. I have been trying to do this for a while now and I finally got it working. This has been tested on Fedora 41 Silverblue.

1. Install Distrobox and Podman

• I recommend you install them both from your distros official repos

2. Create the container (root is required)

• distrobox create netbird --init --image debian:12 -a "--cap-add=NET_ADMIN" --additional-packages systemd --root
• I am using Debian 12 here but you can use something else if you want

3. Enter the container

• distrobox enter --root netbird

4. Install Netbird and bring it up

• curl -fsSL https://pkgs.netbird.io/install.sh | sh
• netbird up

5. That's it. The container has network privileges so you can use Netbird IPs outside the container.

To stop Netbird run distrobox stop --root netbird. To quickly start it run distrobox enter --root netbird -- exit

Also remember to upgrade the packages in the container from time to time