Publishing LXD images

While some work remains to be done for ‘lxc publish’, the current support is sufficient to show a full cycle of image workload with lxd.

Ubuntu Wily comes with systemd by default. Sometimes you might need a Wily container with upstart. And to repeatedly reproduce some tests on Wily with upstart, you might want to create a container image.

# lxc remote add lxc images.linuxcontainers.org
# lxc launch lxc:ubuntu/wily/amd64 w1
# lxc exec w1 -- apt-get -y install upstart-bin upstart-sysv
# lxc stop w1
# lxc publish --public w1 --alias=wily-with-upstart
# lxc image copy wily-with-upstart remote:  # optional

Now you can start a new container using

# lxc launch wily-with-upstart w-test-1
# lxc exec w-test-1 -- ls -alh /sbin/init
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 18 10:20 /sbin/init -> upstart
# lxc exec w-test-1 run-my-tests

Importantly, because “–public” was passed to the lxc publish command, anyone who can reach your lxd server or the image server at “remote:” will also be able to use the image. Of course, for private images, don’t use “–public”.