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. Check out this blog post to see it in action.

NOTICE: The master branch is targetting an initial beta for 1.0.0, for the latest stable version of the plugin, please check the 0.8-stable branch.

Usage with Vagrant 1.5

Usage with the recently released Vagrant 1.5 is only possible by building the plugin from sources. The 1.0.0.beta1 version of the plugin that will ship with the changes required is expected to be released by the end of March 2014.

Features

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

As of now, it does not support public / private networks, but private networks will be coming along soon.

Requirements

• Vagrant 1.1+
• lxc 0.7.5+
• redir (if you are planning to use port forwarding)
• A kernel != 3.5.0-17.28

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.

NOTE: Some users have been experiencing networking issues and right now you might need to disable checksum offloading as described on this comment

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-quantal64-2013-10-23

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 '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.

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.box = "quantal64"

  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

Avoiding sudo passwords

This plugin requires a lot of sudoing since user namespaces are not supported on mainstream kernels. To work around that, you can use the vagrant lxc sudoers command which will create a file under /etc/sudoers.d/vagrant-lxc-<USER> 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.

vagrant-lxc < 1.0.0 users, please check this Wiki page

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 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