Setting up Linux Containers (LXC)

What are LXCs?

Containers are a lightweight virtualization technology. They are more akin to an enhanced chroot than to full virtualization like Qemu or VMware, both because they do not emulate hardware and because containers share the same operating system as the host.

Installing lxc

First of all, you have to install lxc and its dependencies. So, go ahead and issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install lxc

Downloading a template and creating a container

The next step, after installing lxc, is to download the template you want and create the container:

sudo lxc-create -t download -n n1

After executing the above command, the system will list the available templates and interactively ask you to choose among the options of Distribution,

Release and Architecture.

In this example, we will use an archlinux image.

Distribution: archlinux

Release: current

Architecture: amd64

Note: Adjust the above options to your needs.

Once the operation is finished, you’ll see the following message:

You just created an ArchLinux container (release=current, arch=amd64, variant=default)

For security reason, container images ship without user accounts
and without a root password.

Use lxc-attach or chroot directly into the rootfs to set a root password
or create user accounts.

This means that the container has been created successfully.

You can verify that the container is created by issuing the following command:

sudo lxc-ls --fancy

Which will return:

NAME STATE   AUTOSTART GROUPS IPV4 IPV6 
n1   STOPPED 0         -      -    -

Running a container

To run the created container, you have to execute the following command:

sudo lxc-start -n n1 -d

Obviously, n1 is the container we created earlier.

To see if it started, run:

sudo lxc-ls --fancy

Which will now return:

NAME STATE   AUTOSTART GROUPS IPV4       IPV6 
n1   RUNNING 0         -      10.0.3.119 -

Attaching to a container

You can connect to the running container using the

lxc-attach

  command.

sudo lxc-attach -n n1

You will be then logged in as root to the newly created container.

Stopping a container

You can stop a container with the following command:

sudo lxc-stop -n <container name>

For our example:

sudo lxc-stop -n n1

Destroying a container

If you want to completely destroy a container:

sudo lxc-destory -n <container name>

 

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