Context

To understand how Kameleon works you have to get the context notion. A context is an execution environnement with its variables (like $PATH, $TERM,…), its tools (debootstrap, yum, …) and all its specifics (filesystem, local/remote, …).

It also manage the connections to your context and make it easy and reliable. When you build an appliance you deal with 3 contexts:

• The local context which is the Kameleon execution environnement

• The out context where you will bootstrap the appliance

• The in context which is inside the newly created appliance

These context are setup using the two globals variables: out_context and in_context. They both takes 3 arguments:

cmd

The command used to access the context.

workdir (optional)

The working directory to tell to Kameleon where to execute the command

exec_prefix (optional)

The command to execute before every Kameleon command in this context

For example, you are building an appliance on your laptop and you run Kameleon in a bash shell with this configuration:

out_context:
    cmd: /bin/bash
    workdir: $${kameleon_cwd}

in_context:
    cmd: ssh my_user@localhost -p 2222 /bin/bash
    workdir: /root/kameleon_workdir
    exec_prefix: sudo

Your local context is this shell where you launch Kameleon on your laptop, the out is a child bash of this context, and the in is inside the new environnement accessed by the chroot. As you can see the local and the out context are often very similar but sometimes it could be useful for the out context to be elsewhere (in a VM for example).