Creating custom LXD images

Tutorials
1
Key Value
Summary Create custom Ubuntu or Debian LXD images to use locally or publish
Categories containers
Difficulty 3
Author Marcin Mikołajczak me@m4sk.in

Overview

Duration: 1:00

LXD is a container hypervisor providing a ReST API to manage LXC containers.

logo

This tutorial will show how to create a custom LXD image based on a basic Debian (or Debian-based distribution like Ubuntu) installation, to use locally or to publish.

Requirements

  • Ubuntu 16.04 or newer
  • You should know how to create and launch an LXD/LXC container

Originally authored by Marcin Mikołajczak

Install required packages

Duration: 1:00

Installing debootstrap

To create minimal Debian system in specified directory from existing Linux installation, we will use debootstrap. Install it using:

sudo apt install debootstrap

We assume that you have already installed and configured LXD. If not, complete the “Setting up LXD on Ubuntu 16.04” tutorial.

Creating basic system installation

Duration: 5:00

Installing Debian with debootstrap

After installing debootstrap, we can create a minimal installation of Debian in a specified directory. The command takes two arguments: the release to create and the target directory . To install Debian Sid (unstable) in new temporary directory:

mkdir /tmp/sid-lxd
sudo debootstrap sid /tmp/sid-lxd

ⓘ You can specify a mirror as a third argument to install another Debian-based distribution. For example, to install Ubuntu Artful, use sudo debootstrap artful /tmp/somewhere http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/.

Now, enter the created chroot and make some changes, just to make our container different. For example, we can preconfigure the repository for the popular JavaScript runtime, Node.js:

sudo chroot /tmp/sid-lxd
wget -qO- https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | apt-key add -
echo 'deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x sid main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
echo 'deb-src https://deb.nodesource.com/node_8.x sid main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
exit

Compressing system root directory in .tar.gz file.

If everything worked fine, create a compressed tarball of the root directory of your newly installed system:

sudo tar -cvzf rootfs.tar.gz -C /tmp/sid-lxd .

Creating a metadata file

Duration: 2:00

The metadata.yaml file describes things like image creation date, name, architecture and description. To create an LXD image, we need to provide such a file. Here’s an example of how simple metadata file should look:

architecture: "x86_64"
creation_date: 1458040200 # To get current date in Unix time, use `date +%s` command
properties:
architecture: "x86_64"
description: "Debian Unstable (sid) with preconfigured Node.js repository (20171227)"
os: "debian"
release: "sid"

Creating a tarball from the metadata file

After creating metadata file, we need to create tarball containing this file:

tar -cvzf metadata.tar.gz metadata.yaml

Now, it’s time for importing our new LXD image!

Importing LXD images

Duration: 2:00

After creating them, let’s import our two tarballs as LXD images:

lxc image import metadata.tar.gz rootfs.tar.gz --alias sid-nodejs

We can now create a new container from this image:

lxc launch sid-nodejs tutorial
lxc exec tutorial bash

You can verify whether our container uses Node.js repository with sudo apt update && apt-cache show nodejs. The nodejs package should contain 1nodesource1 in “Version”.

Making images public

Duration: 3:00

Configuring the LXD daemon

The LXD daemon works as an image server. In order to use it, we have to make LXD listen to the network and tag our image as public:

lxc config set core.https_address "[::]:8443"

Now, other users can add our server as a public image server using:

lxc remote add [name] [IP] --public

They can use following command to create containers from our image:

lxc launch [name]:[image-name]

Making LXD images public

To make our LXD image available for our server users, we have to modify the public parameter, it’s false by default:

lxc image edit sid-nodejs

It will open image properties in system default text editor. Replace false in the last line with true and save the file. You have just shared your LXD image!

That’s all!

Now you should know how to create LXD images and use LXD daemon to share them with others.

If you’d like to know more about LXD, take a look at the following resources:

Also, if you have questions or need help, you can find direct help here:

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architecture is listed twice

3

The IRC handle for LXD needs to be updated. #lxcontainers is no longer on freenode. It is now #lxc on Libera (irc.libera.chat).

Also, I would suggest updating the Ubuntu distro note to an LTS version such as Jammy or Focal.

Might just be personal preference, but I think newcomers to building LXD images will be more familiar with and recognize series names such as focal or jammy, but not an older non-LTS releases such as Artful Ardvark. For a second I thought it was a release of Debian (my eyes usually jump to the command first in a sentence/block quote :sweat_smile:)