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 redir and a apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade the kernel.

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://dl.dropbox.com/u/13510779/lxc-quantal-amd64-2013-07-12.box

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. In order to work around that we can use a really dumb AND INSECURE Ruby wrapper script like the one below and add a NOPASSWD entry to our /etc/sudoers file:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
exec ARGV.join(' ')

For example, you can save the code above under your /usr/bin/lxc-vagrant-wrapper, turn it into an executable script by running chmod +x /usr/bin/lxc-vagrant-wrapper and add the line below to your /etc/sudoers file:

USERNAME ALL=NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/lxc-vagrant-wrapper

WARNING: the /usr/bin/lxc-vagrant-wrapper + /etc/sudoers combination above allows USERNAME to run any privileged command without a password. You might want to think twice before using that on a machine with sensitive data.

In order to tell vagrant-lxc to use that script when sudo is needed, you can pass in the path to the script as a configuration for the provider:

Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider :lxc do |lxc|
    lxc.sudo_wrapper = '/usr/bin/lxc-vagrant-wrapper'
  end
end

If you want to set the sudo_wrapper globally, just add the code above to your ~/.vagrant.d/Vagrantfile.

Base boxes

Please check the wiki for a list of pre built base boxes and information on how to build your own.

More information

Please refer the wiki for more information.

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)"

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request