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containers
bubblewrap
C2016–2026
containers / bubblewrap

bubblewrap

Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
80Distinct people
94Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
9.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Low-level unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak and similar projects

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

If you want to learn more about container security I recommend https://blog.jessfraz.com/ and https://github.com/projectatomic/bubblewrap

wmf used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year94 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-08-07 13:03:40 UTC to 2026-10-10 15:11:41 UTC.

05101520252016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 1 submissions, 13 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 12 mentions; 1 submissions, 11 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 11 mentions; 1 submissions, 10 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 24 mentions; 0 submissions, 24 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14113
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC12111
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC11110
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC24024

What Hacker News says

11 sources
dannyfritz07·Nov 30, 2025
I've been messing with sandboxing using "bwrap" for random itch.io games I download to play and it isn't trivial to get it working with least privileges. I have so far been unable to get "Microlandia" to run, but other Unity games are running just fine under "bwrap". I am excited to see more Landlock tools emerge that make this task easier. - https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap - https://codeberg.org/dannyfritz/dotfiles/src/commit/38343008... - https://explodi.itch.io/microlandia
In Landlock-Ing Linux
qwertox·Nov 9, 2025
Bubblewrap is a really interesting project, really worth checking out. https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap It's the base for Flatpack, the thing that makes Flatpack be sandboxed. I use it to run Claude Code / Codex / Gemini CLI, to make sure that they have a limited / fake view of my system. You can bind directories into it, or overlay them into it, restrict other kinds of access. If Docker is a thing in a scale between a VM and your OS, Bubblewrap is a thing a scale between Docker and your OS. You use your OS, instead of installing and managing an OS like you do with Docker, but you get filesystem and process isolation like with Docker. Though I had an issue where I cannot use `--new-session`, which is kind of dangerous to not use, but you can get around it if you use seccomp to block ioctl calls, and ptrace.
In Using bubblewrap to add sandboxing to NetBSD
secureblue·Aug 27, 2025
secureblue creator here :) some corrections: > last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet It is > But it uses containers rather than VMs It doesn't use plain containers for app isolation. We ship the OS itself as a bootable container (https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc). That doesn't mean we use or recommend using containers for application isolation. Container support is actually disabled by default via our selinux policy restricting userns usage (this can be toggled though, of course). Containers on their own don't provide sandboxing. The syscall filtering for them is extremely weak. Flatpak (which sandboxes via bubblewrap: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap) can be configured to be reasonably good, but we still encourage the use of VMs if needed. We provide one-click tooling for easily installing virt-manager (https://en.
Read the rest
wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager) if desired. In short though, secureblue and Qubes aren't really analogous. We have different goals and target use cases. There is even an open issue on Qubes to add a template to use secureblue as a guest: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755
In Malicious versions of Nx and some supporting plugins were published
globular-toast·Jul 25, 2025
There are some more obvious things you should do (in order): 1. Have backups. You are running software all the time that can corrupt your files either maliciously or, more likely, accidentally. It doesn't really matter where it comes from, 2. Get into the habit of running things in sandboxes. You don't need anything magical here, a separate (unprivileged) user account is a good enough sandbox for many things. I outline an approach for installing Calibre like this on my blog[0] (the official site uses the `curl ... | sudo sh` pattern!) You could do more clever things like using bwrap[1] to isolate things, or use a distro designed for this kind of thing. Be aware if using a separate user account that your home directory might still be readable so if you're worried about privacy check that, or use bwrap so it's not exposed at all. [0] https:
Read the rest
//blog.gpkb.org/posts/calibre-rootless-install/ [1] https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
In Vet is a safety net for the curl | bash pattern
mivirl·Mar 15, 2025
> 1. Mount current read-only directory to Docker without Internet access (and without access to local network or other processes) 2. Run `fd` 3. Print the results 4. Destroy the container Systemd has a lot of neat sandboxing features [1] which aren't well known but can be very useful for this. You can get pretty far using systemd-run [2] in a script like this: #!/bin/sh uid="$(id -u)" gid="$(id -g)" cwd="$(pwd -P)" sudo systemd-run --system --pty --same-dir --wait --collect --service-type=exec \ --uid="$uid" \ --gid="$gid" \ -p "TemporaryFileSystem=/:ro /tmp" \ -p "BindReadOnlyPaths=-/bin -/sbin -/usr/bin -/usr/sbin -/lib -/lib64 -/usr/lib -/usr/lib64 -/usr/libexec" \ -p "BindPaths=$cwd" \ -p "PrivateNetwork=true" \ -p "PrivateDevices=true" \ -p "PrivateIPC=true" \ -p "
Read the rest
RestrictNamespaces=true" \ -p "RestrictSUIDSGID=true" \ -p "CapabilityBoundingSet=" \ "$@" Which creates a blank filesystem with no network or device access and only bind mount the specified files. Unfortunately TemporaryFileSystem require running as a system instance of the service manager rather than per-user instance, so that will generally mean running as root (hence sudo). One approach is to create a suid binary that does the same without needing sudo. [1] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... [2] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst... You could also use bubblewrap [3] pretty similarly, and may not need to use sudo if unprivileged user namespaces are allowed by your kernel. #!/bin/sh cwd="$(pwd -P)" bwrap --new-session --die-with-parent \ --tmpfs /tmp \ --ro-bind-try /bin /bin \ --ro-bind-try /sbin /sbin \ --ro-bind-try /usr/bin /usr/bin \ --ro-bind-try /usr/sbin /usr/sbin \ --ro-bind-try /lib /lib \ --ro-bind-try /lib64 /lib64 \ --ro-bind-try /usr/lib /usr/lib \ --ro-bind-try /usr/lib64 /usr/lib64 \ --ro-bind-try /usr/libexec /usr/libexec \ --bind "$cwd" "$cwd" \ --dev-bind /dev/null /dev/null \ --dev-bind /dev/zero /dev/zero \ --dev-bind /dev/random /dev/random \ --unshare-net \ --unshare-ipc \ --cap-drop ALL \ --chdir "$cwd" \ "$@" [3] https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
In Tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action Compromised – used by over 23K repos

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