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 the plugin in action and find out more about it.

Features / Limitations

• Provides the same workflow as the Vagrant VirtualBox provider
• Port forwarding via redir
• Does not support private networks

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 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 https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc/wiki/Usage-on-Linode 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: 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://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-name>/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.

Similar projects

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

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