[lxc-users] [FWIW] Autostart lxc (lxd) containers

[Mark Constable]

This info was hard (for me) to come by so maybe it will help someone
else just starting out with lxc (lxd) containers. I'm using wily on a
laptop host with btrfs. Condensed shell history as non-root user...

lxc remote add upstream images.linuxcontainers.org
lxc image list upstream:
lxc image copy upstream:/ubuntu/wily/amd64 local: --alias=wily
lxc image list
lxc launch wily w1
lxc exec w1 bash
  /etc/init.d/networking restart
  apt update
  apt --no-install-recommends install nano openssh-server git wget
  nano /etc/rc.local
    # add below before the exit 0
    sleep 5 && /etc/init.d/networking restart
  passwd ubuntu
  halt

On the host add this systemd unit file (change w1 to your container name)...

~ cat /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/lxd-autostart.service
[Unit]
Description=Start lxc containers created with lxd
After=lxd.service
Requires=lxd.service

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/lxc start w1

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target


Now when I reboot my host laptop I get...

markc at markc ~ lxc list
+------+---------+-------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| NAME |  STATE  |    IPV4     | IPV6 | EPHEMERAL | SNAPSHOTS |
+------+---------+-------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| w1   | RUNNING | 192.168.0.6 |      | NO        | 0         |
+------+---------+-------------+------+-----------+-----------+

And ssh ubuntu at 192.168.0.6 works. All a bit of a kludge but it's enough
for me to continue working with unprivileged containers rather than have
to rely on legacy lxc.