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 Vagrant VirtualBox provider for Linux hosts.

Check out this blog post to see the plugin in action and find out more about it.

Features

• Vagrant's up, halt, reload, destroy, ssh, provision and package commands
• Shared folders
• Provisioning with any built-in Vagrant provisioner
• Port forwarding
• Setting container's host name

Please refer to the closed issues and the changelog for most up to date information.

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 redir and a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade the kernel.

Some manual steps are required to set up a Linode machine prior to using this plugin, please check https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc/wiki/Usage-on-Linode for more information. The same applies to Debian hosts and documentation will be provided soon.

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: http://the.taoofmac.com/space/HOWTO/Vagrant or use use the same Ubuntu 12.10 VirtualBox machine I use for development.

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://dl.dropbox.com/u/13510779/lxc-quantal-amd64-2013-05-08.box

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

This will make vagrant-lxc pass in -s lxc.cgroup.memory.limit_in_bytes=1024M to lxc-start when booting containers. This will override any previously value set from container's configuration file that is usually kept under /var/lib/lxc/<container-name>/config.

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

Available boxes

LINK	DESCRIPTION
lxc-raring-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Ubuntu 13.04 Raring x86_64 (Puppet 3.1.1)
lxc-quantal-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal x86_64 (Puppet 3.1.1 & Chef 11.4.0)
lxc-precise-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Ubuntu 12.04 Precise x86_64 (Puppet 3.1.1 & Chef 11.4.0)
lxc-sid-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Debian Sid (Puppet 3.1.1)
lxc-wheezy-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Debian Wheezy (Puppet 3.1.1)
lxc-squeeze-amd64-2013-05-08.box	Debian Squeeze (Puppet 3.1.1)

Please note that I'm currently using only the quantal x86_64 on a daily basis, and I've only done some basic testing with the others

There is a set of rake tasks that you can use to build base boxes as needed. By default it won't include any provisioning tool and you can pick the ones you want by providing some environment variables.

For example:

CHEF=1 rake boxes:ubuntu:build:precise64

Will build a Ubuntu Precise x86_64 box with Chef pre-installed.

Current limitations

• The plugin does not detect forwarded ports collision, right now you are responsible for taking care of that.
• There is a hell lot of sudos involved and this will probably be around until user namespaces are supported.
• Does not tell you if dependencies are not met (will probably just throw up some random error)
• • bunch of other core features and some known bugs

More information

Please refer the wiki for more information.

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.

Similar projects

• vagabond - "a tool integrated with Chef to build local nodes easily"
• vagueant - "vaguely like Vagrant for linux containers (lxc)"

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