Where can I find the biggest LXC container repository?

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I can’t seem to find any LXC containers for most apps ?

Specificatlly I’m looking for a clipbucket, mediagoblin, kaltura, YouPHPTube, piped, cloudtube, pumukit, mediadrop, shareavideo to try them all out and find which one I should use for my usage

I did find one repository from 2018, but it’s been deleted

https://github.com/bmullan/ciab-lxd-image-repository

was from A Public LXD Image Repository

Is there not one “big repository” ? Maybe there’s one but it’s paywalled ? (maybe the proxmox paid repo ?) What is the biggest repo by a LXC sponsor maybe ?

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LXC and LXD are meant to be used with system-containers, not application containers.
system-containers are to be treated like VMs, they just work differently under the hood.

That means you can simply launch a container using your favorite OS(e.g. Ubuntu) and install all the software that you want using the usual methods(like the distros package manager).

Reference: https://linuxcontainers.org/

Blockquote
Our focus is providing containers and virtual machines that run full Linux systems. While VMs supply a complete environment, system containers offer an environment as close as possible to the one you’d get from a VM, but without the overhead that comes with running a separate kernel and simulating all the hardware.

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The system images available are here:

https://images.linuxcontainers.org/

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Ok thanks for the replies

So suppose I want to build a mail server with LXC.

I would get a “blank” LXC container like “almalinux 9 amd64”

Do the installation and setup of the 20 or so components that are needed for a mail server.

Then, what do you do with that completed container ?

I presume images.linuxcontainers.org is not the place to post it ?

Is there really no repository ? Everyone who uses LXC, needs to build a entire mail server from scratch every time ?

This seems very inefficient to me !

I understand that LXC is more of a system container than an application container. But what is the purpose of a system with no applications ?

Is LXC just supposed to run docker on top when you want to put an application in it ?

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You cannot post to http://images.linuxcontainers.org/ these are images provided by the LXD team.

However each LXD server can act as a public image repository, so if you do create custom images you can lxc publish them using your own LXD server.

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Hi!

You can create your LXD repository on your server

Here is a link to a blog that shows how to publish LXD images (https://ubuntu.com/blog/publishing-lxd-images)

Or you can use this solution, but I never tested it (https://github.com/Avature/lxd-image-server)

Regards.

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I think the user was looking for something like Turnkey Linux, which is a prominent feature of Proxmox’s LXC implementation, and was expecting the same on LXD.

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FYI you can run Docker containers with LXC, since the standardization of the format. But you typically wont.

If you want pre-configured applications LXC is not the right tool.

Mail service is a good example of where LXC shines: mail servers are typically composed of many smaller servers, so with LXC you can choose the components you want, integrate them in the lab and roll out when you are pretty sure you are not deploying a spam bot for the Internet at large to use. :kissing_heart:

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And noawadays of course : https://bketelsen.github.io/IncusScripts/

Edited to add : seems project is now archived, but can be seen here : GitHub - bketelsen/IncusScripts: Incus Helper-Scripts

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Hello,

I would like question again the notion that “LXC is for systems, docker is for applications”

I am not a fan of docker’s cloud centric approach and I would much rather “have a single offline capable file that contains system and application”

Since I create this thread, I took to making my own scripts to take an LXC system and build it into the various applications that I need.

I think I’m doing like what “distrobuilder” does but for applications.

And now I’ve discovered that a lot of other people are doing the same thing, as mentionned above tteck (RIP) and now “Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts”

Helper-Scripts.com

I think this points to the validity of my initial argument, in the absence of an LXC standalone application repository, now we have app builder repository.

I don’t know what the mission of the LXC project is, but I think there is, or was potential that it could be, or at least recommend and interact with, LXC application repositories. And also create LXC distributions tailored to the idea that it will be used to run some kind of application like “vaultwarden” or whatever.

I predict in the future, we will see something like the same process as distributions, for instance

Now I think of distrobuilder, like slackware and debian, ready made bare LXC system where the user is expected to do the rest.

I think of the proxmox helper scripts a lot like pre-gentoo install scripts to streamline building and installing application, like make scripts maybe.

I suspect we will see someone soon make a helper script helper for promox

Where you just type something like
hs install vaultwarden

and it will either fetch the vaultwarden LXC build script, or , preferably, maintain a local repository of scripts that you can, or not, keep up to date.

So that is kind of like the emerge / portage system of gentoo

I think after a while we’re going to see the same transition from gentoo to arch, where binaries are built in a central repository and the LXC-bin install scripts just download pre-compiled, pre-assembled folders of application, unpack them into fresh LXCs and then run that.

And later one, we’ll probably get just full on “LXC as single files” repository, it just downloads a single file, that’s the full, self-contained, ready to run, LXC and it deploys as soon as you can download it.

This might point to a future like Nixos where you create an LXC definition file, like of like the distrobuilder files, and whatever is happenning inside your LXC, it will reconfigure it to match you specification on boot, in a kind of parametric-immutable way.

I also imagine we will see in the web user interface of proxmox, a way to just click on the LXC application that you want and it will install them.

I am also surprised there is not a distrobuilder LXC that is easily usable locally, so that end user can customer their LXC base to suit their application.

I think that is another way that this could go, see how there is a cloud-init version of most LXCs, that is just an application being built into the LXC, this system could just as well install the target application like “vaultwarden” and we could have distrobuilder create directly a “Vaultwarden LXC” compressed file in one go.

In a way, distro builder it seems is a step in front of the helperscripts as it is the infrastructure to create ready-to-use LXC binary files.. It is strange to me this isn’t being use for that purpose. Does anyone use distrobuilder ? Is it still just a private IT tool that hasn’t “trickled down” into the homelab/homeserver/selfhost communities ?

I just checked, there is not a “helper script” for a distrobuilder LXC builder script.

Is there a distrobuilder Web UI ? Or maybe a distrobuilder web API that local scripts could call to ask your self-hosted local distrobuilder instance to build you a fresh Vaultwaden LXC, sourced from locally caches files ?

And finally, I think we might be looking at a “LXC-nixos” where you just have this blank nix-os LXC, you insert your nix.conf file or whatever it’s called and it just build itself, preferably sourced from locally cached files in a completely offline-airgapped process.

To me this is “obviously” the future of server running, at least at home. I do not enjoy spending weeks building these build script, or messing around with other people’s build scripts. And when I have them completed, I have nowhere really to share them and there is no viable discussion space for them.

I created a ONIE builder environement that automatically starts from zero and gives you built ONIE boot ISO and distro for your switch. This was extremely niche thing of people who buy datacenter switches from 2012-2022, but there is not a repository to post, neither my LXC file nor my script.

I think all that I described above is sorely missing from this LXC ecosystem.

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seems to be dead sadness. the link gives a 404.