THIS PROJECT IS NOT MAINTAINED ANY MORE; PLEASE CHECK IF ONE OF THE FORKS IS. Linux Containers (lxc) Hacky Userspace Tools ============================================ This is a collection of utility scripts I've written to make using lxc a bit more bearable in Debian. For more information, see the article at: http://nigel.mcnie.name/blog/a-five-minute-guide-to-linux-containers-for-debian All of these scripts are released under the terms of the GNU GPL, version 3 or later. Added a preliminary script for Ubuntu Lucid (basically adding a function for modifying the Upstart init script). Installs on an LVM partition; unfortunately hard-coded at the moment. lxc-debian ---------- `lxc-debian' is a script to create and destroy debian based linux containers. This particular version is based on the one that ships with the lxc package in debian unstable (/usr/share/doc/lxc/examples/lxc-debian.gz), but with a few modifications to make it a little easier to use. To create a container, run lxc-debian create To remove one, run lxc-debian destroy If you want to script some operations for when a container is created, I have added some hooks: /etc/lxc-debian/host-pre-create Shell script that runs on the host before the container is created. It is sourced by lxc-debian, so has access to variables like $NAME, which is the name of the container being created. /etc/lxc-debian/host-post-create Shell script that runs on the host after the container is created. It is sourced by lxc-debian, so has access to variables like $NAME, which is the name of the container being created. /etc/lxc-debian/guest-post-create Script that runs in the container after creation. It's run by chrooting in, so naturally it doesn't have access to variables, though you can get at that information through other ways (e.g. /etc/hostname). lxc-ubuntu ---------- Works just like the lxc-debian script but installs Ubuntu Lucid. Not tested with older versions and pretty unflexible so far. In order to install and boot Ubuntu 10.04 in LXC, the /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf has to be modified: sed -i 's/start on filesystem and net-device-up IFACE=lo/start on filesystem #and net-device-up IFACE=lo/' $ROOTFS/etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf init ---- `init' is an init.d script you can install as /etc/init.d/lxc, that allows you to automatically start up and shut down containers on system start up/shut down. You can mark a container to be started on startup by doing this: echo 1 > /var/lib/lxc/$CONTAINER/autostart All containers will be stopped on shutdown, regardless of the autostart file. Note that this script will endeavour to use lxc-halt-container if it's in /usr/bin, see the docs for lxc-halt-container below for more information. lxc-status ---------- Runs lxc-info on all the containers and exits, leading to output like this: nigel@bubbles:~$ sudo bin/lxc-status 'test' is STOPPED 'debian-lenny' is STOPPED 'ponies' is RUNNING lxc-halt-container ------------------ Will stop a linux container SAFELY. ``lxc-stop`` brutally murders the container and all processes in it, which isn't good especially if you have daemons inside them. lxc-halt-container will run 'halt' in the container, then lxc-stop once all the processes are gone (or after a configurable timeout if it's taking too long). There's one trick - there's no easy way to run the halt command in the container, because the lxc developers haven't provided a nice way to run a single command in a running container yet. So you have to provide such a command. If you install the `default' file into /etc/default/lxc, you can edit that to change the command to halt a container. The default is ``ssh [container] halt``, which of course will only work if your container is resolvable at that hostname. If you install lxc-halt-container in /usr/bin, then the init.d script will use it when you issue /etc/init.d/lxc stop. It will try stopping all the containers in parallel, but if you have a few containers it might take a while for all of them to stop.