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.

First, enable the community repository.

Then, install the lxd and dbus packages (dbus is needed for some containers as they refuse to start if unavailable)

 apk add lxd lxd-client lxcfs dbus

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 to start at boot:

 rc-update add lxc
 rc-update add lxd
 rc-update add lxcfs

If you have problems, try to enable dbus:

 rc-update add dbus

Reboot and lxd should be working.