Getting started¶
Building LXDock on Linux¶
LXDock should build very easily on Linux provided you have LXD available on your system.
Prerequisite: install LXD¶
You may want to skip this section if you already have a working installation of LXD on your system.
LXD is available in the repository for Debian or Ubuntu 16.04 and higher:
$ sudo apt-get install lxd
You can now also install LXD from Snap which works on Ubuntu 14.04 and higher. Since the LXD PPA has been deprecated, this is now the easiest way to get the latest version of LXD on Ubuntu.
Note
If you have already installed and configured LXD from apt earlier and
want to upgrade to the Snap version, you may need to purge LXD packages
first and reboot for the old network bridge to be removed. You can migrate
existing containers using lxd.migrate or just start fresh.
$ sudo apt-get purge lxd lxd-client
To install LXD from a Snap instead of apt:
$ sudo apt-get install snapd
$ sudo snap install lxd
$ sudo snap start lxd
For Fedora, LXD is available through an experimental COPR repository. Unfortunately SELinux is not yet supported, therefore make sure it is disabled or set to permissive. Then run:
$ dnf copr enable ganto/lxd
$ dnf install lxd lxd-tools
You should now be able to configure your LXD installation using:
$ newgrp lxd # ensure your current user can use LXD
$ sudo lxd init
Note
The lxd init command will ask you to choose the settings to apply to your LXD installation in
an interactive way (storage backend, network configuration, etc). But if you just want to go fast
you can try the following commands (note that this will only work for LXD 2.3+):
$ newgrp lxd
$ sudo lxd init --auto
$ lxc network create lxdbr0 ipv6.address=none ipv4.address=10.0.3.1/24 ipv4.nat=true
$ lxc network attach-profile lxdbr0 default eth0
You can now check if your LXD installation is working using:
$ lxc launch ubuntu: first-machine && lxc exec first-machine bash
Note
You can use lxc stop first-machine to stop the previously created container.
Install LXDock¶
You should now be able to install LXDock using:
$ pip3 install lxdock
Note
It is good practice to install lxdock in a virtualenv rather than installing
it globally as root, but make sure you always use a python3 virtualenv.
To use lxdock from any location without having to activate this virtualenv,
you can create a symlink from the lxdock executable in the virtualenv to
/usr/bin/lxdock or /usr/local/bin/lxdock.
Note
Don’t have pip3 installed on your system? Most distros have a specific package for it, it’s
only a matter of installing it. For example, on Debian and Ubuntu, it’s python3-pip.
Otherwise, Stackoverflow can help you.
Command line completion¶
LXDock can provide completion for commands, options and container names.
Bash¶
If you use Bash, you have to make sure that bash completion is installed (which should be the case
for most Linux installations). In order to get completion for LXDock, you should place the
contrib/completion/bash/lxdock file at /etc/bash.completion.d/lxdock (or at any other place
where your distribution keeps completion files):
$ sudo curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lxdock/lxdock/$(lxdock --version | cut -d ' ' -f 2)/contrib/completion/bash/lxdock -o /etc/bash_completion.d/lxdock
Make sure to restart your shell before trying to use LXDock’s bash completion.
ZSH¶
To add zsh completion for LXDock, place the contrib/completion/zsh/_lxdock file at
/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_lxdock (or another folder in $fpath):
$ sudo curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lxdock/lxdock/$(lxdock --version | cut -d ' ' -f 2)/contrib/completion/zsh/_lxdock -o /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/_lxdock
Make sure to restart your shell before trying to use LXDock’s zsh completion.
Your first LXDock file¶
Create a file called .lxdock.yml (or lxdock.yml) in your project directory and paste the
following:
name: myproject
containers:
- name: test01
image: ubuntu/xenial
- name: test02
image: archlinux
This LXDock file defines a project (myproject) and two containers, test01 and test02.
These containers will be constructed using respectively the ubuntu/xenial and the archlinux
images (which will be pulled from an image server - https://images.linuxcontainers.org by default).
Now from your project directory, start up your containers using the following command:
$ lxdock up
Bringing container "test01" up
Bringing container "test02" up
==> test01: Unable to find container "test01" for directory "[PATH_TO_YOUR_PROJECT]"
==> test01: Creating new container "myproject-test01-11943450" from image ubuntu/xenial
==> test01: Starting container "test01"...
==> test01: No IP yet, waiting 10 seconds...
==> test01: Container "test01" is up! IP: [CONTAINER_IP]
==> test01: Doing bare bone setup on the machine...
==> test01: Adding ssh-rsa [SSH_KEY] to machine's authorized keys
==> test01: Provisioning container "test01"...
==> test02: Unable to find container "test02" for directory "[PATH_TO_YOUR_PROJECT]"
==> test02: Creating new container "myproject-test02-11943450" from image archlinux
==> test02: Starting container "test02"...
==> test02: No IP yet, waiting 10 seconds...
==> test02: Container "test02" is up! IP: [CONTAINER_IP]
==> test02: Doing bare bone setup on the machine...
==> test02: Adding ssh-rsa [SSH_KEY] to machine's authorized keys
==> test02: Provisioning container "test02"...
Congrats! You’re in!
Problems?¶
If you’re having problems trying to run your container, try running them in privileged mode. Many older distributions have an init system that doesn’t work well with unprivileged containers (debian/jessie notably). Some host-side problems can also be worked around by running privileged containers.
If you received a permission denied error running the lxc network commands below:
$ lxc network create lxdbr0 ipv6.address=none ipv4.address=10.0.3.1/24 ipv4.nat=true
$ lxc network attach-profile lxdbr0 default eth0
Run these commands below and then run the lxc network commands again. You should now be able to proceed with the remaining instructions.
$ sudo systemctl stop lxd.socket
$ sudo systemctl start lxd.socket