env_inspector

A minimal Rust crate to detect whether your application is running in a container, a virtual machine, or on bare metal (no container/VM).

Features

Detect common container environments (Docker, Kubernetes, Podman)
Identify hypervisor flag in CPU info
Inspect DMI fields to recognize VM vendors (KVM, VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, Xen, AWS, GCP)
No external dependencies or network calls

Installation

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
env_inspector = "0.1.0"

Then fetch the crate:

cargo build

Usage

Call the detect_scope function to get an EnvScope enum:

use env_inspector::{detect_scope, EnvScope};

fn main() {
    match detect_scope() {
        EnvScope::Kubernetes => {
            println!("Running inside Kubernetes");
        }
        EnvScope::Container(engine) => {
            println!("Running inside container: {}", engine);
        }
        EnvScope::Vm(vendor) => {
            println!("Running inside VM: {}", vendor);
        }
        EnvScope::BareMetal => {
            println!("Running on bare metal");
        }
    }
}

Running Tests

Execute the built‑in unit tests:

cargo test

CLI Example

Optionally, include a small binary in src/bin/inspect.rs:

use env_inspector::detect_scope;

fn main() {
    println!("{:#?}", detect_scope());
}

Build and run it:

cargo run --bin inspect

The test code (src/bin/inspect.rs) should print: BareMetal.

Running as a Docker container

Build the image and run a container:

cargo build --release
docker build -t env-inspector .
docker run --rm env-inspector

You should see this message:

Container(
    "docker",
)

If you run it with podman it can detect it:

podman pull docker-daemon:env-inspector:latest
podman run --rm docker-daemon:env-inspector:latest

Container(
    "podman",
)

Running in Kubernetes

Build and push the Docker image:

# Build locally
docker build -t your-registry/env-inspector:latest .
# Push to your registry (Docker Hub, ECR, GCR, etc.)
docker push your-registry/env-inspector:latest

Create a Pod manifest (k8s/pod.yaml):

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: env-inspector-test
spec:
  containers:
    - name: inspector
      image: your-registry/env-inspector:latest
      command: ["inspect"]
  restartPolicy: Never

Deploy to your cluster:
```
kubectl apply -f k8s/pod.yaml
```
Check the logs:
```
kubectl logs pod/env-inspector-test
```

You should see output indicating kubernetes, confirming that the code correctly detected the environment inside the cluster.

Running inside a VM Hypervisor

You need some hypervisor like VirtualBox. If you have vagrant then it is easy to run it with the supplied Vagrantfile:

vagrant up

default: Vm(
default:     "hypervisor",
default: )

vagrant destroy -f

env_inspector 0.1.1