Historically, we spawned the Seatbelt and Landlock sandboxes in
substantially different ways:
For **Seatbelt**, we would run `/usr/bin/sandbox-exec` with our policy
specified as an arg followed by the original command:
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/d1de7bb383552e8fadd94be79d65d188e00fd562/codex-rs/core/src/exec.rs#L147-L219
For **Landlock/Seccomp**, we would do
`tokio::runtime::Builder::new_current_thread()`, _invoke
Landlock/Seccomp APIs to modify the permissions of that new thread_, and
then spawn the command:
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/d1de7bb383552e8fadd94be79d65d188e00fd562/codex-rs/core/src/exec_linux.rs#L28-L49
While it is neat that Landlock/Seccomp supports applying a policy to
only one thread without having to apply it to the entire process, it
requires us to maintain two different codepaths and is a bit harder to
reason about. The tipping point was
https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/1061, in which we had to start
building up the `env` in an unexpected way for the existing
Landlock/Seccomp approach to continue to work.
This PR overhauls things so that we do similar things for Mac and Linux.
It turned out that we were already building our own "helper binary"
comparable to Mac's `sandbox-exec` as part of the `cli` crate:
https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/d1de7bb383552e8fadd94be79d65d188e00fd562/codex-rs/cli/Cargo.toml#L10-L12
We originally created this to build a small binary to include with the
Node.js version of the Codex CLI to provide support for Linux
sandboxing.
Though the sticky bit is that, at this point, we still want to deploy
the Rust version of Codex as a single, standalone binary rather than a
CLI and a supporting sandboxing binary. To satisfy this goal, we use
"the arg0 trick," in which we:
* use `std::env::current_exe()` to get the path to the CLI that is
currently running
* use the CLI as the `program` for the `Command`
* set `"codex-linux-sandbox"` as arg0 for the `Command`
A CLI that supports sandboxing should check arg0 at the start of the
program. If it is `"codex-linux-sandbox"`, it must invoke
`codex_linux_sandbox::run_main()`, which runs the CLI as if it were
`codex-linux-sandbox`. When acting as `codex-linux-sandbox`, we make the
appropriate Landlock/Seccomp API calls and then use `execvp(3)` to spawn
the original command, so do _replace_ the process rather than spawn a
subprocess. Incidentally, we do this before starting the Tokio runtime,
so the process should only have one thread when `execvp(3)` is called.
Because the `core` crate that needs to spawn the Linux sandboxing is not
a CLI in its own right, this means that every CLI that includes `core`
and relies on this behavior has to (1) implement it and (2) provide the
path to the sandboxing executable. While the path is almost always
`std::env::current_exe()`, we needed to make this configurable for
integration tests, so `Config` now has a `codex_linux_sandbox_exe:
Option<PathBuf>` property to facilitate threading this through,
introduced in https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/1089.
This common pattern is now captured in
`codex_linux_sandbox::run_with_sandbox()` and all of the `main.rs`
functions that should use it have been updated as part of this PR.
The `codex-linux-sandbox` crate added to the Cargo workspace as part of
this PR now has the bulk of the Landlock/Seccomp logic, which makes
`core` a bit simpler. Indeed, `core/src/exec_linux.rs` and
`core/src/landlock.rs` were removed/ported as part of this PR. I also
moved the unit tests for this code into an integration test,
`linux-sandbox/tests/landlock.rs`, in which I use
`env!("CARGO_BIN_EXE_codex-linux-sandbox")` as the value for
`codex_linux_sandbox_exe` since `std::env::current_exe()` is not
appropriate in that case.
This is a substantial PR to add support for the chat completions API,
which in turn makes it possible to use non-OpenAI model providers (just
like in the TypeScript CLI):
* It moves a number of structs from `client.rs` to `client_common.rs` so
they can be shared.
* It introduces support for the chat completions API in
`chat_completions.rs`.
* It updates `ModelProviderInfo` so that `env_key` is `Option<String>`
instead of `String` (for e.g., ollama) and adds a `wire_api` field
* It updates `client.rs` to choose between `stream_responses()` and
`stream_chat_completions()` based on the `wire_api` for the
`ModelProviderInfo`
* It updates the `exec` and TUI CLIs to no longer fail if the
`OPENAI_API_KEY` environment variable is not set
* It updates the TUI so that `EventMsg::Error` is displayed more
prominently when it occurs, particularly now that it is important to
alert users to the `CodexErr::EnvVar` variant.
* `CodexErr::EnvVar` was updated to include an optional `instructions`
field so we can preserve the behavior where we direct users to
https://platform.openai.com if `OPENAI_API_KEY` is not set.
* Cleaned up the "welcome message" in the TUI to ensure the model
provider is displayed.
* Updated the docs in `codex-rs/README.md`.
To exercise the chat completions API from OpenAI models, I added the
following to my `config.toml`:
```toml
model = "gpt-4o"
model_provider = "openai-chat-completions"
[model_providers.openai-chat-completions]
name = "OpenAI using Chat Completions"
base_url = "https://api.openai.com/v1"
env_key = "OPENAI_API_KEY"
wire_api = "chat"
```
Though to test a non-OpenAI provider, I installed ollama with mistral
locally on my Mac because ChatGPT said that would be a good match for my
hardware:
```shell
brew install ollama
ollama serve
ollama pull mistral
```
Then I added the following to my `~/.codex/config.toml`:
```toml
model = "mistral"
model_provider = "ollama"
```
Note this code could certainly use more test coverage, but I want to get
this in so folks can start playing with it.
For reference, I believe https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/247 was
roughly the comparable PR on the TypeScript side.
As stated in `codex-rs/README.md`:
Today, Codex CLI is written in TypeScript and requires Node.js 22+ to
run it. For a number of users, this runtime requirement inhibits
adoption: they would be better served by a standalone executable. As
maintainers, we want Codex to run efficiently in a wide range of
environments with minimal overhead. We also want to take advantage of
operating system-specific APIs to provide better sandboxing, where
possible.
To that end, we are moving forward with a Rust implementation of Codex
CLI contained in this folder, which has the following benefits:
- The CLI compiles to small, standalone, platform-specific binaries.
- Can make direct, native calls to
[seccomp](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/seccomp.2.html) and
[landlock](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/landlock.7.html) in
order to support sandboxing on Linux.
- No runtime garbage collection, resulting in lower memory consumption
and better, more predictable performance.
Currently, the Rust implementation is materially behind the TypeScript
implementation in functionality, so continue to use the TypeScript
implmentation for the time being. We will publish native executables via
GitHub Releases as soon as we feel the Rust version is usable.
Michael Bolin ·
Parker Thompson ·