Introduction

LXD is a next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead. It allows an easier management and deployment of LXC containers.

For now, Alpine Linux has a LXD package only for Edge so, first of all, you have to upgrade to Edge.

Then, let's start installing lxd and dbus packages (dbus is needed for some containers as they refuse to start if unavailable)

 apk add lxd dbus

Then, let's set some options to be able to run the containers as unprivileged:

 echo "session optional pam_cgfs.so -c freezer,memory,name=systemd,unified" >> /etc/pam.d/system-login
 echo "lxc.idmap = u 0 100000 65536" >> /etc/lxc/default.conf
 echo "lxc.idmap = g 0 100000 65536" >> /etc/lxc/default.conf
 echo "root:100000:65536" >> /etc/subuid
 echo "root:100000:65536" >> /etc/subgid

If you plan to run systemd based Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), add this to /etc/conf.d/lxc:

 systemd_container=yes

and enable both lxc and lxd at boot:

 rc-update add lxc
 rc-update add lxd

If you have problems, try to enable dbus:

 rc-update add dbus

Reboot and lxd should be working.