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 this is not even alpha software and things might go wrong.

Dependencies

Just LXC and bsdtar as of now, which on Ubuntu 12.10 means:

sudo apt-get install lxc bsdtar

Current limitations that I can remember

• Ruby >= 1.9.3 only, patches for 1.8.7 are welcome
• There is no support for setting a static IP. I'm using LXC's built in dns server to determine containers' IPs
• sudos
• only ubuntu cloudimg supported, I'm still figuring out what should go on the .box
• "works on my machine" (TM)
• plus a bunch of other core features

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

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 vagrant-lxc gets installed, create a Vagrantfile like the one below and run vagrant-lxc up --provider=lxc:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "ubuntu-cloud"

  # 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
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 ;)

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 boxes:build:ubuntu-cloud
bundle exec rake # to run all specs

Using VirtualBox for development

I've also prepared a Vagrant 1.0 VirtualBox machine for development that you can get up and running with the setup-vagrant-dev-box script. Feel free to use it :)

cp Vagrantfile.dev.1.0 Vagrantfile
./setup-vagrant-dev-box
vagrant ssh

NOTE: setup-vagrant-dev-box takes around 10 minutes on a 15mb connection after the base vagrant box and ubuntu lxc cloud img have been downloaded

Protip

If you want to find out more about what's going on under the hood, prepend VAGRANT_LOG=debug to your vagrant-lxc commands like:

VAGRANT_LOG=debug vagrant-lxc up

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

The container does not stop from vagrant halt

There is some hidden bug which I wasn't able to reproduce properly, if that happens to you, just run lxc-shutdown -n container_name and try again.

I'm unable to start containers!

Sometimes the Virtual Box dev machine I'm using is not able to lxc-start containers anymore. Most of the times it was an issue with the arguments I provided to it. If you run into that, just try to vagrant reload the dev box since most of the times things get back to normal. If it still doesn't work, you can try to run setup-vagrant-dev-box again to restore an snapshot that it creates automagically for you.

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