Hello,
I originally installed Incus from the native Debian repository, just to notice it does not contain a web UI. I then installed the web UI from the zabbly LTS repo, but it also replaced the Debian packages of Incus.
As I intend to have this setup on a stable production environment I’m a bit unsure if I should use this repo, as it might disappear, not get updated anymore etc. in the next years.
Is there an option to install the web UI without replacing the native Debian packages? Maybe there is a other (better?) web UI than the one from Canonical? It seems to lack some basic functionality like removing the ISO file after installation.
Best regards
Stefan
There’s an upstream bug to track any progress on getting the Incus UI packaged for Debian.
In the meantime, using the LTS packages from Zabbly will be the easiest way to get a UI available for your system. That repo won’t disappear or become unmaintained; it’s published by @stgraber (the Incus project lead developer).
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Thanks for your answer. Unfortunately there hasn’t been any news on that bug tracker since 1.5 years, but from my understanding the situation is like this:
- There is no Incus developer actively working on the web UI and unlike Incus itself, which is a hard fork of lxd, there is no fork of the lxd web-ui, but rather just some some patches to make the lxd webui work on Incus
- It is troublesome to build and maintain with the unclean source situation, so Debian won’t include it until there is a properly maintained fork
Someone wanted to create a proper fork and has Debian packages of the UI that are supposed to work the with the Debian Incus packages, but the last commit is also over a year old, for me it seems that it’s not actively maintained. So Zabbly remains the best option, and when it’s provided by the lead developer it gives me a lot more confidence in it.
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I’m kind of confused here. So when I look at the readme here:
…it would have me install straight up lxd:
sudo snap install lxd
So what I’m hearing is that a “switcheroo” is later on done, so now that ui uses incus as the backend, not lxd?
But I don’t see mention of a “switcheroo” anywhere in that README. What I see is that in step 3, we are “Done”. No further mention of incus. The end of the line, so to speak, is reached with lxd. 
Here’s the jist I gathered: owing to Caninocal’s highly distasteful design choice of Node.js (and to a lesser degree, Typescript), it’s extremely hard to ever make a proper Debian package of incus-ui-canonical (called more generically, “incus-ui”). At best, we might hope for some hero-like person to provide an unofficial Debian source for it.
More likely, but even worse security-wise, someone will make a Docker container, where the 600ish (risky-for-suppply-chain-attacks) Node.js library dependencies will be “muck-shovelled” into, so to speak.
Updating a README is pretty low priority. 
With the Zabbly repo enabled, you can run apt install incus-ui-canonical to get the web UI.
Debian is a “do-ocracy” – if no one is sufficiently motivated to package requested software then it doesn’t get done. I personally don’t use the web UI, so while I have a direct interest in maintaining the Incus packages in Debian, I don’t have the interest/best background for packaging a web application.
You might also consider Introducing Hye Ararat: A Web UI native to Incus , which looks like it’s under pretty active development.
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