So, more LXD! Today we are going to run some Alpine Linux containers on LXD. Why? Alpine describe themselves as a “security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.”, what’s there not to like? It has become quite popular in the Docker world due to the small yet fully functional containers one can create.

Building an Alpine container on LXD is not that straightforward, however. There are no Alpine images on the official repo, so we will have to build our own. LXD does provide some documentation on how an image should be like, lo let’s get to it!

I started by taking a look at the template for LXC. That was close enough, so I went ahead and modified it in order to create LXD images. That resulted in lxd-alpine-builder.

With that script, we can now create an image and then import it into LXD:

sudo ./build-alpine
lxc image import alpine-v3.3-x86_64-20160114_2308.tar.gz --alias alpine-v3.3

That image is 2.39MB, w00t! You can check it by listing the images:

saghul@lxd-test:~$ lxc image list
+----------------------------+--------------+--------+---------------------------------+--------+----------+-------------------------------+                                                                      
|           ALIAS            | FINGERPRINT  | PUBLIC |           DESCRIPTION           |  ARCH  |   SIZE   |          UPLOAD DATE          |                                                                      
+----------------------------+--------------+--------+---------------------------------+--------+----------+-------------------------------+                                                                      
| alpine-v3.3                | 9888dd281789 | no     | alpine v3.3 (20160114_23:08)    | x86_64 | 2.39MB   | Jan 14, 2016 at 11:10pm (CET) |                                                                      
| jessie-amd64               | 9f065ac6be10 | no     | Debian jessie (amd64)           | x86_64 | 102.66MB | Jan 12, 2016 at 4:17pm (CET)  |                                                                      
| jessie-amd64-base          | b85a1bdb5057 | no     | Debian Jessie base              | x86_64 | 87.98MB  | Jan 12, 2016 at 9:56am (CET)  |                                                                      
| jessie-amd64-base-sysvinit | 628b7f8470af | no     | Debian Jessie base (no systemd) | x86_64 | 82.91MB  | Jan 12, 2016 at 11:40am (CET) |                                                                      
| jessie-i386                | 769f90666ea8 | no     | Debian jessie (i386)            | i686   | 100.23MB | Jan 15, 2016 at 9:54am (CET)  |                                                                      
+----------------------------+--------------+--------+---------------------------------+--------+----------+-------------------------------+

Now we can launch a container and test it out!

lxc launch alpine-v3.3 alpinetest
lxc exec alpinetest /bin/ash
# cat /etc/alpine-release 
3.3.1

Happy containering!