This package provides a cli plugin for juju that allows for fast provisioning of lxc containers as machines with the juju environment.

Juju already has a local provider that can create lxc (or kvm) machines, but at the time of this plugin writing those are suboptimal as they consume extraneous network/disk/cpu resources per container creation.

Instead this provider relies on cloning container images with snapshots, and minimal extraneous software installation.

Its expected that these features will be merged into the local provider implementation so that juju's out of the box developer experience is awesome.

If your using the aufs containers, you need to use lxc 1.0, if your not on trusty, this can be gotten from the lxc stable ppa. https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-lxc/+archive/stable

There's not much automation in jlxc at the moment, so there are a few manual steps.

There's an ansible playbook available as ec2.yml that will automate the setup of an instance in ec2 with ebs volume setup for btrfs.

First you'll need to decide if your using btrfs or aufs, if your using btrfs, you'll need to mount /var/lib/lxc via btrfs. This can be done using additional drives or loopback devices. For aufs no additional setup is needed.

Next, you'll need to setup your base/template container:

$ lxc-create -t ubuntu-cloud -n precise-base -- -r precise -S ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
$ lxc-create

Creating containers:

$ jlxc-add -h

usage: jlxc-add [-h] [-b BASE_NAME] [-f {btrfs,aufs}] [-c COUNT] [-s OFFSET] [-e ENV_NAME]
Add container to environment

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -b BASE_NAME, --base BASE_NAME
                      Base container to clone
  -f {btrfs,aufs}, --fs {btrfs,aufs}
                      Filesystem type
  -c COUNT, --count COUNT
                      Number of containers to create
  -s OFFSET, --offset OFFSET
                      Name index offset
  -e ENV_NAME, --environment ENV_NAME
                      Juju environment

For example to add 5 containers to the 'foobar' environment using aufs:

$ jlxc-add -c 5 -e foobar -b precise-subvol

Removing containers, by default removes all manual containers:

$ jlxc-remove -e foobar

• Make proper juju plugin
• Document usage.
• Automate environment configuration