Ruby-LXC

Introduction

Ruby-LXC is a Ruby binding for liblxc. It allows the creation and management of Linux Containers from Ruby scripts.

Build and installation

Assuming a current installation of LXC is available, to install Ruby-LXC simply run the commands below

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev lxc-dev

bundle install
bundle exec rake compile
bundle exec rake gem
gem install pkg/ruby-lxc-1.2.0.gem

or just add this to your Gemfile

gem "ruby-lxc", github: "lxc/ruby-lxc", require: "lxc"

Usage

• Container lifecycle management (create, start, stop and destroy containers)

  require 'lxc'
  c = LXC::Container.new('foo')
  c.create('ubuntu') # create a container named foo with ubuntu template
  c.start
  # attach to a running container
  c.attach do
  LXC.run_command('ifconfig eth0')
  end
  c.stop
  c.destroy

• Container inspection

  c.name
  c.config_path
  c.config_item('lxc.cap.drop')
  c.cgroup_item('memory.limit_in_bytes')
  c.init_pid
  c.interfaces
  c.ip_addresses
  c.state

• Additional state changing operations (freezing, unfreezing and cloning containers)

  c.freeze
  c.unfreeze
  c.reboot
  c.shutdown

• Clone a container

  # clone foo into bar. Parent container has to be frozen or stopped.
  clone = c.clone('bar')

• Wait for a state change

  # wait until container goes to STOPPED state, else timeout after 10 seconds
  c.wait(:stopped, 10)

Check the provided rdoc documentation for a full list of methods. You can generate it running

rake rdoc