easy-lxc

Wrapper to make using LXC easy

About

This project supplies a single lx command, a bash script, through which you can perform installation of LXC, and set up un-privileged users.

Additionally, the lx command allows you to

• Create new containers
• start containers and automatically
  • assign a local /etc/hosts entry based on the container's name
  • expose a container's ports to an interface + port on the host
• stop and destry containers
• clone containers

Future goals are to enable it to

• manage the NAT traversal more fully
  • allow specifying port exposition rules for the container
  • adding and removing rules on start/stop of the container automatically
• add more management to unprivileged users
  • re-configure un-privileged users' quotas
  • remove un-privilieged users
  • configure containers for a nobody user (?)
• move containers between users

Usage

Copy the bin/lx command to an appropriate location (suggestion: /usr/local/bin)

Run with root permissions to install lxc

lx install

You will be asked whether to set up an unprivileged user to be able to use lxc and create containers.

To add more users, run lxc install again.

For container operations, the first argument must be the action, the second must be the name of the container to operate on.

Create a new container with

lx create mycontainer

Expose ports - for example, expose the container's port 80 on the host's interface eth1 on its port 8080

lx use mycontainer -e eth1 8080 80

The -e option can be used with most operations. Since it uses the iptables command, sudo permission is needed, or the command must be run as root.

Start and stop containers

lx start mycontainer
lx stop mycontainer

Starting and stopping containers will automatically try to add an appropriately-named entry to the /etc/hosts file. This requires sudo ability. To suppress this, run instead

lx start mycontainer -z
lx stop mycontainer -z

You can connect to the container using either the attach command to get a root session

lx attach mycontainer

or the ssh command to ssh to the container (if an ssh is installed and running on the container)

lx ssh mycontainer
lx ssh mycontainer -u user
lx ssh mycontainer -u user -p port

Other commands are also available. See lx --help for more info.