vagrant-lxc

LXC provider for Vagrant 1.1+

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.

Features / Limitations

• Provides the same workflow as the Vagrant VirtualBox provider
• Port forwarding via redir
• Does not support public / private networks
• Assumes you have a lxcbr0 bridge configured on your host similar to Ubuntu's built-in

Requirements

• Vagrant 1.1+
• lxc 0.7.5+
• redir (if you are planning to use port forwarding)
• A bug-free kernel

The plugin is known to work better and pretty much out of the box on Ubuntu 12.04+ hosts and installing the dependencies on it basically means a apt-get install lxc lxc-templates cgroup-lite redir and a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade the kernel. For Debian hosts you'll need to follow the instructions described on the Wiki.

Some manual steps are required to set up a Linode machine prior to using this plugin, please check the wiki for more information. Documentation on how to set things up for other distros are welcome :)

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

Usage

After installing, add a base box using any name you want, for example:

vagrant box add quantal64 http://bit.ly/vagrant-lxc-quantal64-2013-07-12

Then create a Vagrantfile that looks like the following, changing the box name to the one you've just added:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "quantal64"
end

And finally run vagrant up --provider=lxc.

If you are using Vagrant 1.2+ you can also set VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER environmental variable to lxc in order to avoid typing --provider=lxc all the time.

Advanced configuration

If you want, you can modify container configurations from within your Vagrantfile using the provider block:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "quantal64"
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    # Same effect as 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.

Avoiding sudo passwords

This plugin requires a lot of sudoing since user namespaces are not supported on mainstream kernels. Have a look at the Wiki to find out how to work around that specially if you are running an OS with sudo < 1.8.4 (like Ubuntu 12.04) as you might be affected by a bug.

Base boxes

Please check the wiki for a list of pre built base boxes and have a look at BOXES.md for more information on building your own.

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 to ask questions, propose new functionality and / or report bugs.

Donating

Support this project and others by fgrehm via gittip.

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