Does LXC and LXD support the functional equivalent of Dockerfile or docker-compose.yml? I appreciate how Docker has become widely accepted for defining reproducible environments but have always found it to be rather heavy on resources.
LXC and LXD: a different container story
11–20 of 102 posts
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#12Hi, author of the article, pleased to see it here! I'd really like to hear more from folks about how they're using LXC and/or LXD, and what they think their greatest strengths are compared to Docker or Kubernetes.
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#13I use LXD + ansible for my personal projects. IMO the main benefit I see is it requires very low cognitive overhead. It's insanely easy to set up a container, I only need to remember like 3 commands ever. These programs will never be clustered either so theres no point in having a scheduler.
What would those 3 commands be? As a developer who has not used LXD, I’m curious for insight into the developer experience.
lxc launch and lxc start/stop
First one you supply the image you want (like ubuntu:20.04) and the rest are self explanatory.
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#14Back in 2016, I thought it'd be nice if LXC/D had something like a Dockerfile. It would just be a small layer or tool to do it, proved with a little python script: https://github.com/jonatron/lxf
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#15I ran LXD for about a year in my home lab. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get it running is by installing Snap; which I didn't do. Instead I ran it on Alpine Edge (one of the few distros that actually has it in their package manager). LXD kept breaking after system updates and I got tired of troubleshooting. I suppose that's just part of the perils of running bleeding edge.
When LXD was running, I found that it feels like something between a VM and OCI container. In the whole pets vs cattle analogy, LXD containers definitely feel more like pets.
On the host, concepts are similar to OCI containers (networking, macvlan, port mapping, etc). I like its approach to building up containers with several commands instead of one long command. You can add and remove ports, volumes, and even GPUs to running containers. It doesn't have compose files, I just used bash scripts to create reproducible containers.
Inside the LXD container is where things get different. You're containerizing a whole OS, not an application. So you end up administering your container like a VM. You jump inside it, update its packages, install whatever application and dependencies you need. It doesn't work like a glorified package manager (which is how most homelabbers use Docker). As a long time VM user I actually prefer installing things myself, but I can see this turning away many people in the selfhosting community.
I liked LXD and would've kept using it if it weren't so intimately linked to Snap. Last month it failed to start my containers after a system update...again. So I moved that box over to Rocky with Podman containers running as SystemD units. I do kinda miss having fast, throwaway OSes on that server for experiments (sometimes its nice to have pets).
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#16I ran LXD for about a year in my home lab. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get it running is by installing Snap; which I didn't do. Instead I ran it on Alpine Edge (one of the few distros that actually has it in their package manager). LXD kept breaking after system updates and I got tired of troubleshooting. I suppose that's just part of the perils of running bleeding edge. When LXD was running, I found that it fe…
Someone packages it for opensuse. It has been stable for me on tumbleweed for a couple of years.
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#17Back in 2016, I thought it'd be nice if LXC/D had something like a Dockerfile. It would just be a small layer or tool to do it, proved with a little python script: https://github.com/jonatron/lxf
LXD containers are built up using commands. I have one bash script for every container.
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#18Hi, author of the article, pleased to see it here! I'd really like to hear more from folks about how they're using LXC and/or LXD, and what they think their greatest strengths are compared to Docker or Kubernetes.
I'm using LXC just to have a painless way to have a second SSH server (for SFTP) running on the computer that has different usernames and passwords.
Literally all that is installed is Alpine Linux and the SSH server. There's a symbolic link to get to the shared files.
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#19I ran LXD for about a year in my home lab. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get it running is by installing Snap; which I didn't do. Instead I ran it on Alpine Edge (one of the few distros that actually has it in their package manager). LXD kept breaking after system updates and I got tired of troubleshooting. I suppose that's just part of the perils of running bleeding edge. When LXD was running, I found that it fe…
Someone packages it for opensuse. It has been stable for me on tumbleweed for a couple of years.
Thanks for the info. Never used OpenSuse, but next time my curiosity swings back around to LXD I'll check it out!
Re: LXC and LXD: a different container story
#20I ran LXD for about a year in my home lab. Unfortunately, the easiest way to get it running is by installing Snap; which I didn't do. Instead I ran it on Alpine Edge (one of the few distros that actually has it in their package manager). LXD kept breaking after system updates and I got tired of troubleshooting. I suppose that's just part of the perils of running bleeding edge. When LXD was running, I found that it fe…
I've been using it in my homelab for a while on Arch with ZFS. Never had any issues with upgrades.
However, I once wanted to rename my zpool. Boy was I up for a world of hurt. In the end, I just reinitialized everything (the VMs themselves were easy to get back up).