Workshop: sandboxed development environments on Ubuntu with one command

Canonical has introduced Workshop, a tool that launches sandboxed development environments on Ubuntu with a single command. You define the environment once and reproduce it exactly on any machine, without wrestling with dependencies or workstation setup every time you switch projects or computers.

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering at Canonical, frames the problem directly: “Developers operating at the cutting edge want to focus on what they’re building, not on dependencies or workstation configuration.” Anyone who has set up a project mixing CUDA, several SDKs and a handful of runtime versions knows that pain well.

How it works

Each environment is described in a plain YAML document. That file can live in version control and be shared with the rest of the team, so everyone starts from the same configuration instead of following a README by hand and hoping it works. The same YAML produces the same environment on a teammate’s laptop and on yours, even when the hardware differs.

Under the hood, Workshop runs environments in unprivileged system containers through LXD. To reach host resources it uses an interface system inspired by snapd: rather than fiddly mapping scripts, you declare what you need and Workshop exposes mounts, devices and network services in a standardized way. This keeps the attack surface small, since the environment only gets the permissions you ask for instead of full system access. You can also build custom interfaces for specific hardware.

SDKs and integrations

Out of the box it supports tools common in AI work and modern development:

• Ollama for serving language models locally.
• OpenCode.
• NVIDIA CUDA for GPU compute.
• AMD ROCm as the AMD-card alternative.

That fits one of the use cases Canonical highlights: running AI agents in a contained space. Workshop enforces strict access controls with non-privileged defaults, so an agent that writes and runs code stays confined to what you allow, without touching the rest of your machine. If that area interests you, it connects to how Canonical is using Ubuntu Core 26 to build local AI appliances.

What you need to try it

Workshop requires LXD 6.8 or newer and installs as a snap with classic confinement. The two commands to get set up are:

sudo snap install --channel=6/stable lxd
sudo snap install --classic workshop

From there, you write your YAML and launch the environment. For anyone juggling several projects with heavy dependencies, or teams that want everyone on the same starting point, it’s a direct way to put “works on my machine” behind you. And the unprivileged-container confinement makes it reasonable for testing third-party code or agents you’d rather not let loose on your system.

Source

Original announcement by Canonical: Introducing Workshop: launch sandboxed development environments on Ubuntu with a single command (ubuntu.com/blog).