REST API, command line tool and OpenStack integration plugin for LXC.
LXD is pronounced lex-dee.
To easily see what LXD is about, you can try it online.
- Travis:
- Jenkins:
Since LXD development is happening at such a rapid pace, we only provide daily builds right now. They're available via:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/lxd-git-master && sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lxd
After you've got LXD installed, you can take your first steps.
We recommend having the latest versions of liblxc (>= 1.1 required) and CRIU (>= 1.7 recommended) available for LXD development. Additionally, LXD requires Golang 1.3 or later to work. All the right verisons dependencies are available via the LXD PPA:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-lxc/lxd-git-master
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install golang lxc lxc-dev mercurial git pkg-config protobuf-compiler golang-goprotobuf-dev xz-utils tar acl
There are a few storage backends for LXD besides the default "directory" backend. Installing these tools adds a bit to initramfs and may slow down your host boot, but are needed if you'd like to use a particular backend:
sudo apt-get install lvm2 thin-provisioning-tools
sudo apt-get install btrfs-tools
To run the testsuite, you'll also need:
sudo apt-get install curl gettext jq sqlite3 uuid-runtime pyflakes pep8 shellcheck bzr
LXD consists of two binaries, a client called lxc and a server called lxd.
These live in the source tree in the lxc/ and lxd/ dirs, respectively. To
get the code, set up your go environment:
mkdir -p ~/go
export GOPATH=~/go
And then download it as usual:
go get github.com/lxc/lxd
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/lxc/lxd
make
...which will give you two binaries in $GOPATH/bin, lxd the daemon binary,
and lxc a command line client to that daemon.
You'll need sub{u,g}ids for root, so that LXD can create the unprivileged containers:
echo "root:1000000:65536" | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid /etc/subgid
Now you can run the daemon (the --group sudo bit allows everyone in the sudo group to talk to LXD; you can create your own group if you want):
sudo -E $GOPATH/bin/lxd --group sudo
LXD has two parts, the daemon (the lxd binary), and the client (the lxc
binary). Now that the daemon is all configured and running (either via the
packaging or via the from-source instructions above), you can import an image:
$GOPATH/src/github.com/lxc/lxd/scripts/lxd-images import ubuntu --alias ubuntu
With that image imported into LXD, you can now start containers:
$GOPATH/bin/lxc launch ubuntu
Alternatively, you can also use a remote LXD host as a source of images. Those will be automatically cached for you for up at container startup time:
$GOPATH/bin/lxc remote add images images.linuxcontainers.org
$GOPATH/bin/lxc launch images:centos/7/amd64 centos
Bug reports can be filed at https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/new
Fixes and new features are greatly appreciated but please read our contributing guidelines first.
Contributions to this project should be sent as pull requests on github.
Sometimes it is useful to view the raw response that LXD sends; you can do this by:
lxc config set core.trust_password foo
lxc remote add local 127.0.0.1:8443
wget --no-check-certificate https://127.0.0.1:8443/1.0 --certificate=$HOME/.config/lxc/client.crt --private-key=$HOME/.config/lxc/client.key -O - -q
We use the LXC mailing-lists for developer and user discussions, you can find and subscribe to those at: https://lists.linuxcontainers.org
If you prefer live discussions, some of us also hang out in #lxcontainers on irc.freenode.net.
By default LXD server is not accessible from the networks as it only listens
on a local unix socket. You can make LXD available from the network by specifying
additional addresses to listen to. This is done with the core.https_address
config variable.
To see the current server configuration, run:
lxc config show
To set the address to listen to, find out what addresses are available and use
the config set command on the server:
ip addr
lxc config set core.https_address 192.168.1.15
By default, LXD has no password for security reasons, so you can't do a remote add this way. In order to set a password, do:
lxc config set core.trust_password SECRET
on the host LXD is running on. This will set the remote password that you can
then use to do lxc remote add.
You can also access the server without setting a password by copying the client
certificate from .config/lxc/client.crt to the server and adding it with:
lxc config trust add client.crt
LXD supports various storage backends; below are instructions on how to configure some of them. By default, we use a simple directory backed storage mechanism, but we recommend using ZFS for best results.
First, you need to install the ZFS tooling. On Wily and above this is just:
sudo apt-get install zfsutils-linux
ZFS has many different ways to procure a zpool, which is what you need to feed LXD. For example, if you have an extra block device laying around, you can just:
sudo zpool create lxd /dev/sdc6
However, if you want to test things out on a laptop or don't have an extra disk laying around, ZFS has its own loopback driver and can be used directly on a (sparse) file. To do this, first create the sparse file:
sudo truncate -s 100G /var/lib/lxd.img
then,
sudo zpool create lxd /var/lib/lxd.img
Finally, whichever method you used to create your zpool, you need to tell LXD to use it:
lxc config set storage.zfs_pool_name lxd
The setup for btrfs is fairly simple, just mount /var/lib/lxd (or whatever your
chosen LXD_DIR is) as a btrfs filesystem before you start LXD, and you're
good to go. First install the btrfs userspace tools,
sudo apt-get install btrfs-tools
Now, you need to create a btrfs filesystem. If you don't have an extra disk laying around, you'll have to create your own loopback device manually:
sudo truncate -s 100G /var/lib/lxd.img
sudo losetup /dev/loop0 /var/lib/lxd.img
Once you've got a loopback device (or an actual device), you can create the btrfs filesystem and mount it:
sudo mkfs.btrfs /dev/loop0 # or your real device
sudo mount /dev/loop0 /var/lib/lxd
To set up LVM, the instructions are similar to the above. First, install the userspace tools:
sudo apt-get install lvm2 thin-provisioning-tools
Then, if you have a block device laying around:
sudo pvcreate /dev/sdc6
sudo vgcreate lxd /dev/sdc6
lxc config set storage.lvm_vg_name lxd
Alternatively, if you want to try it via a loopback device, there is a script provided in /scripts/lxd-setup-lvm-storage which will do it for you. It can be run via:
sudo apt-get install lvm2
./scripts/lxd-setup-lvm-storage -s 10G
And it has a --destroy argument to clean up the bits as well:
./scripts/lxd-setup-lvm-storage --destroy
Live migration requires a tool installed on both hosts called CRIU, which is available in Ubuntu via:
sudo apt-get install criu
Then, launch your container with the following,
lxc launch ubuntu $somename
sleep 5s # let the container get to an interesting state
lxc move host1:$somename host2:$somename
And with luck you'll have migrated the container :). Migration is still in experimental stages and may not work for all workloads. Please report bugs on lxc-devel, and we can escalate to CRIU lists as necessary.
Yes. The easiest way to do that is using a privileged container:
lxc launch ubuntu priv -c security.privileged=true
lxc config device add priv homedir disk source=/home/$USER path=/home/ubuntu