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vagrant-lxc

LXC provider for Vagrant 1.9+

This is a Vagrant plugin that allows it to control and provision Linux Containers as an alternative to the built in VirtualBox provider for Linux hosts. Check out this blog post to see it in action.

Features

• Provides the same workflow as the Vagrant VirtualBox provider
• Port forwarding via redir
• Private networking via pipework

Requirements

• Vagrant 1.9+
• lxc >=2.1
• redir (if you are planning to use port forwarding)
• brctl (if you are planning to use private networks, on Ubuntu this means apt-get install bridge-utils)

The plugin is known to work better and pretty much out of the box on Ubuntu 14.04+ hosts and installing the dependencies on it basically means a apt-get install lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir. For setting up other types of hosts please have a look at the Wiki.

If you are on a Mac or Windows machine, you might want to have a look at this blog post for some ideas on how to set things up or check out this other repo for a set of Vagrant VirtualBox machines ready for vagrant-lxc usage.

Installation

vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxc

Quick start

vagrant init fgrehm/precise64-lxc
vagrant up --provider=lxc

_More information about skipping the --provider argument can be found at the "DEFAULT PROVIDER" section of Vagrant docs_

Base boxes

Base boxes provided on Atlas haven't been refreshed for a good while and shouldn't be relied on. Your best best is to build your boxes yourself. Some scripts to build your own are available at hsoft/vagrant-lxc-base-boxes.

If you want to build your own boxes, please have a look at BOXES.md for more information.

Advanced configuration

You can modify container configurations from within your Vagrantfile using the provider block:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "fgrehm/trusty64-lxc"
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    # Same effect as 'customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "1024"]' for VirtualBox
    lxc.customize 'cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes', '1024M'
  end
end

vagrant-lxc will then write out lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes='1024M' to the container config file (usually kept under /var/lib/lxc/<container>/config) prior to starting it.

For other configuration options, please check the lxc.conf manpages.

Private Networks

Starting with vagrant-lxc 1.1.0, there is some rudimentary support for configuring Private Networks by leveraging the pipework project.

On its current state, there is a requirement for setting the bridge name that will be created and will allow your machine to comunicate with the container

For example:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.2.100", lxc__bridge_name: 'vlxcbr1'
end

Will create a new veth device for the container and will set up (or reuse) a vlxcbr1 bridge between your machine and the veth device. Once the last vagrant-lxc container attached to the bridge gets vagrant halted, the plugin will delete the bridge.

Container naming

By default vagrant-lxc will attempt to generate a unique container name for you. However, if the container name is important to you, you may use the container_name attribute to set it explicitly from the provider block:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.define "db" do |node|
    node.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
      lxc.container_name = :machine # Sets the container name to 'db'
      lxc.container_name = 'mysql'  # Sets the container name to 'mysql'
    end
  end
end

_Please note that there is a 64 chars limit and the container name will be trimmed down to that to ensure we can always bring the container up.

Backingstore options

Support for setting lxc-create's backingstore option (-B and related) can be specified from the provider block and it defaults to best, to change it:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    lxc.backingstore = 'lvm' # or 'btrfs', 'overlayfs', ...
    # lvm specific options
    lxc.backingstore_option '--vgname', 'schroots'
    lxc.backingstore_option '--fssize', '5G'
    lxc.backingstore_option '--fstype', 'xfs'
  end
end

Unprivileged containers support

Since v1.4.0, vagrant-lxc gained support for unprivileged containers. For now, since it's a new feature, privileged containers are still the default, but you can have your Vagrantfile use unprivileged containers with the privileged flag (which defaults to true). Example:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    lxc.privileged = false
  end
end

For unprivileged containers to work with vagrant-lxc, you need a properly configured system. On some distros, it can be somewhat of a challenge. Your journey to configuring your system can start with Stéphane Graber's blog post about it.

Avoiding sudo passwords

If you're not using unprivileged containers, this plugin requires a lot of sudoing To work around that, you can use the vagrant lxc sudoers command which will create a file under /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant-lxc whitelisting all commands required by vagrant-lxc to run.

If you are interested on what will be generated by that command, please check this code.

More information

Please refer the wiki.

Problems / ideas?

Please review the Troubleshooting wiki page + known bugs list if you have a problem and feel free to use the issue tracker propose new functionality and / or report bugs.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request