Refresh Your Mind With The LXD API

by Mike Levin

Wow has it been difficult to get my head in the game again, lately. I just moved from the Poconos back to New York City. It has not been easy physically, financially or emotionally. One has to catch one’s self in spiraling. One must exert extreme cognitive and bodily control to undergo such transitions with grace and continuing positivity. This is a large part of what it takes to be human. We are strong.

It’s easy to do “good enough” when you’re following on yesterday’s habits. But when the deck gets reshuffled a bit you can measure yourself and try to do better according to today’s and perchance tomorrow’s standard. The point is not to thrive standing still, but to thrive just as well and better than most in tomorrow’s world.

I’m on a good path with using Linux, Python, vim & git for grounding and nearly all things. But I’m spiraling again. Catch yourself! That disembodied feeling of switching homes, laptops or now as it turns out, containers. I need to settle into a container as a new home and make that LXD container feel like home… every time I open the Terminal.

I want a “new” home that comes from lxd. 1, 2, 3… 1?

Give myself a refresher course. Grounding… grounding? Grounding! It’s what happens when you open a terminal. See if you can change the Linux system you’re running on. Once again, the thing that is important here is learning the lxc command for everyday easy casual use. Or more likely, for a one-time “startup-cost” round of activity, followed by getting back to day-to-day business. We’re in the startup cost phase of new-API-embracing.

Take a look at what containers are available.

lxc ls

Log into it. Check if putting this in .bash_profile works (it does).

lxc exec foo -- su --login ubuntu

Delete the current container:

lxc stop foo
lxc delete foo

Create a new container:

lxc launch images:ubuntu/18.04 GlookingLass

I can log in as root:

lxc exec GlookingLass /bin/bash

I can add a user (with a home directory) and a password:

useradd -m healus
passwd healus

But I don’t think I want to create a new username and password. I can just use the lxc default, ubuntu/ubuntu.

Okay, so it’s really just that easy to create new home directories. This is chroot evolved, for sure. A cookie-cutter template system for slamming out new vanilla Linux systems.

Wow, that’s eerie cool how easy it is to slam out a new container.

They don’t even have a default python!