LXC containers, cloud-init, and hook scripts?

[steevestroke]

Howdy, folks.

Can I get an affirm on this? Proxmox does not support cloud-init for LXC containers, correct? I'm looking at the API docs and they seem to suggest as much as the endpoints and parameters available on the QEMU VM API are not reflected on the container endpoints.

Also, I did some digging into hook scripts as possible alternative. The docs are a bit thin on this feature but it looks to me like hook scripts execute on the Proxmox server for various lifecycle events for both containers and VMs however they **do not** execute in the container or VM. They execute in VE itself. So this is not an escape hatch for lack of cloud-init in containers.

If I have all of this correct, how they do people do deploy-time adjustments to their containers? Most of the time, I would think, there are going to be deploy-time things that need to be adjusted which cannot be pre-baked into custom container images.

Very interested to hear what people have to share.

 

[lutian]

I'd also like to know

 

[bbgeek17]

The PVE built-in cloud-init manipulation is not available for LXC.

However, you should be able to make something work with by combining information from below two links:
https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/lxd.html
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Manual:_pct.conf

Note: I have not tried it personally

Good luck

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[steevestroke]

Hmm...

I was hoping to be able to bootstrap these things from Terraform and so that would require the necessary pieces being available via the PVE API. I'll probably stick with VMs for now. Kinda disappointing.

Feels like I might have some luck running Nomad on PVE w/ Clients w/ nested virtualization and just coming at the container-y workloads that way.

 

[verbbis]

It would arguably be better to rely on a "de facto" standard mechanism instead of a unique method specific to Proxmox. There was even a patch on the mailing list adding support for cloud-init in containers, but unfortunately it was never merged.

https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=4686

 

[steevestroke]

I've since rotated to deploying Nomad control plane and workers on TrueNAS SCALE because the OpenTofu Provider is more complete for that platform. Nomad does have the ability to schedule LXC containers and so I may loop back to this at some point with Nomad spinning the Proxmox LXC containers. It looks like the options for post-deploy config/mutation are more flexible by having Nomad in the mix. Around the horn for sure but my need for LXC is rather limited and I do most of what I need with other container tech.