Dry-run: normalizes and diffs the docker/podman create commands generated by both versions
Inspect: creates real containers with both versions and diffs their inspect output (labels, env, mounts, entrypoint, security/namespace config)

Prerequisites

jq
A container manager (docker or podman)
Shell distrobox (the repo root scripts)
Go binary built (make build from rewrite/)

Usage

Run from the rewrite/ directory:

# Autodetect container manager
./tests/compare.sh

# Explicit container manager
CONTAINER_MANAGER=docker ./tests/compare.sh

# Keep containers after test for manual inspection
./tests/compare.sh --keep

# Override paths to distrobox binaries
DISTROBOX_SHELL_PATH=/usr/bin/distrobox \
DISTROBOX_GO_PATH=./bin/distrobox \
CONTAINER_MANAGER=docker \
    ./tests/compare.sh

Environment variables

Variable	Default	Description
`DISTROBOX_SHELL_PATH`	`../../distrobox` (repo root)	Path to shell distrobox
`DISTROBOX_GO_PATH`	`./bin/distrobox`	Path to Go binary
`CONTAINER_MANAGER`	autodetect	`docker` or `podman`
`KEEP_CONTAINERS`	`0`	Set to `1` to keep containers after test

What gets compared

Dry-run (no containers created):

Flag parity (volumes, env, labels, security opts, namespaces)
All 2^N combinations of boolean flags (--init, --unshare-netns, --unshare-ipc, --unshare-process, --unshare-devsys, --nvidia)
Short-flag aliases (-d, -Y, -I, -ap, etc.)
Assemble create dry-run (basic, with options, with --name filtering)

Inspect (real containers):

Labels
Environment variables
Bind mounts (source paths for distrobox scripts and unnamed docker volumes are redacted)
Entrypoint and command args
Security options, capabilities, PID/IPC/network namespace modes

Flag acceptance (no dry-run available):

rm, stop, generate-entry — shell runs first as reference; if Go rejects flags shell accepts, it's a failure

Exit codes

0: all tests passed
1: at least one failure; temp dir with diffs is preserved for inspection

compare-docker.sh / compare-podman.sh

Convenience wrappers that run compare.sh with a fixed container manager.

./tests/compare-docker.sh
./tests/compare-podman.sh

CI recommendations

PR gate: run compare-docker.sh and compare-podman.sh