vagrant-lxc

Highly experimental, soon to come, Linux Containers support for the unreleased Vagrant 1.1.

Please refer to the closed issues to find out whats currently supported.

WARNING

Please keep in mind that although I'm already using this on my laptop, this is "almost alpha" software and things might go wrong.

Dependencies

LXC, bsdtar and fping packages and a Kernel higher than 3.5.0-17.28, which on Ubuntu 12.10 means:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxc bsdtar fping

What is currently supported?

• Vagrant's up, halt, reload, destroy, and ssh commands
• Shared folders
• Provisioners
• Setting container's host name
• Host-only / private networking

Current limitations

• Ruby >= 1.9.3 only, patches for 1.8.7 are welcome
• A hell lot of sudos
• Only a single ubuntu box supported, I'm still figuring out what should go on the .box file
• "works on my machine" (TM)
• • bunch of other core features and some known bugs

Usage

For now you'll need to install the gem from sources:

git clone git://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc.git --recurse
cd vagrant-lxc
bundle install
bundle exec rake install

Since Vagrant 1.1 has not been released yet and to avoid messing up with you current Vagrant installation, I've vendored Vagrant's sources from the master and made it available from vagrant-lxc. So after installing vagrant-lxc, create a Vagrantfile like the one below and run vagrant-lxc up --provider=lxc:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box     = "lxc-quantal64"
  config.vm.box_url = 'http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13510779/lxc-quantal64-2013-03-08.box'

  # Create a private network, which allows host-only access to the machine
  # using a specific IP.
  # config.vm.network :private_network, ip: "192.168.33.10"

  # Share an additional folder to the guest Container. The first argument
  # is the path on the host to the actual folder. The second argument is
  # the path on the guest to mount the folder. And the optional third
  # argument is a set of non-required options.
  config.vm.synced_folder "/tmp", "/host_tmp"

  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    # Same as 'customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", "1024"]' for VirtualBox
    lxc.start_opts << 'lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes=400M'
    # Limits swap size
    lxc.start_opts << 'lxc.cgroup.memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes=500M'
  end

  # ... your puppet / chef / shell provisioner configs here ...
end

If you don't trust me and believe that it will mess up with your current Vagrant installation and / or are afraid that something might go wrong with your machine, fire up the same Vagrant VirtualBox machine I'm using for development to try things out and do the same as above. That might also get you up and running if you are working on a mac or windows host ;)

Development

If you know what you'll be doing and want to develop from your physical machine, just sing that same old song:

git clone git://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc.git --recurse
cd vagrant-lxc
bundle install
bundle exec rake # to run all specs

To rebuild and add the provided quantal64 box:

bundle exec rake boxes:quantal64:build
vagrant-lxc box add quantal64 boxes/output/lxc-quantal64.box

Using vagrant-lxc to develop itself

Yes! The gem has been [bootstrapped](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) and since you can boot a container from within another, after cloning the project you can run the commands below from the host machine to get a container ready for development:

bundle install
cd development
cp Vagrantfile.lxc Vagrantfile
# Required in order to allow nested containers to be started
sudo apt-get install apparmor-utils
sudo aa-complain /usr/bin/lxc-start
bundle exec vagrant-lxc up

That should result in a container ready to be bundle exec vagrant-lxc sshed. Once you've SSH into the guest container, you'll be already on the project's root. Keep in mind that you'll probably need to run sudo aa-complain /usr/bin/lxc-start on the host whenever you want to hack on it, otherwise you won't be able to start nested containers there to try things out.

Using VirtualBox and Vagrant 1.0 for development

cd development
cp Vagrantfile.vb.1.0 Vagrantfile
vagrant up
vagrant reload

Using VirtualBox and Vagrant 1.1 for development

cd development
cp Vagrantfile.vb.1.1 Vagrantfile
bundle exec vagrant-lxc up
bundle exec vagrant-lxc reload

Protips

If you want to find out more about what's going on under the hood on vagrant, prepend VAGRANT_LOG=debug to your vagrant-lxc commands. For lxc-starts debugging set LXC_START_LOG_FILE:

LXC_START_LOG_FILE=/tmp/lxc-start.log VAGRANT_LOG=debug vagrant-lxc up

This will output A LOT of information on your terminal and some useful information about lxc-start to /tmp/lxc-start.log.

Help!

I've accidentaly ran vagrant-lxc on a Vagrant 1.0 project and I can't use it anymore

That happened to me before so here's how to recover:

rm -rf .vagrant
mv .vagrant.v1* .vagrant

I'm unable to restart containers!

It happened to me quite a few times in the past and it seems that it is related to a bug on linux kernel, so make sure you are using a bug-free kernel (>= 3.5.0-17.28). More information can be found on:

• https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47181
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1021471
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1065434

Sometimes the dev boxes I'm using are not able to lxc-start containers anymore. Most of the times it was an issue with the arguments I provided to it (or a buggy kernel). If you run into that, rollback your changes and try to vagrant reload the dev box. If it still doesn't work, please file a bug at the issue tracker.

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