The command nixos-container can now create containers. For instance,
the following creates and starts a container named ‘database’:
$ nixos-container create database
The configuration of the container is stored in
/var/lib/containers/<name>/etc/nixos/configuration.nix. After editing
the configuration, you can make the changes take effect by doing
$ nixos-container update database
The container can also be destroyed:
$ nixos-container destroy database
Containers are now executed using a template unit,
‘container@.service’, so the unit in this example would be
‘container@database.service’.
For example, the following sets up a container named ‘foo’. The
container will have a single network interface eth0, with IP address
10.231.136.2. The host will have an interface c-foo with IP address
10.231.136.1.
systemd.containers.foo =
{ privateNetwork = true;
hostAddress = "10.231.136.1";
localAddress = "10.231.136.2";
config =
{ services.openssh.enable = true; };
};
With ‘privateNetwork = true’, the container has the CAP_NET_ADMIN
capability, allowing it to do arbitrary network configuration, such as
setting up firewall rules. This is secure because it cannot touch the
interfaces of the host.
The helper program ‘run-in-netns’ is needed at the moment because ‘ip
netns exec’ doesn't quite do the right thing (it remounts /sys without
bind-mounting the original /sys/fs/cgroups).
These are stored on the host in
/nix/var/nix/{profiles,gcroots}/per-container/<container-name> to
ensure that container profiles/roots are not garbage-collected.
This has the unintended side-effect of restarting httpd every time we
run switch-to-configuration, even if httpd hasn't changed (because
we're doing a "stop keys.target" now). So use a "Wants" dependency
instead.
On the host, you can run
$ socat unix:<path-to-container>/var/lib/login.socket -,echo=0,raw
to get a login prompt. So this allows logging in even if the
container has no SSH access enabled.
You can also do
$ socat unix:<path-to-container>/var/lib/root-shell.socket -
to get a plain root shell. (This socket is only accessible by root,
obviously.) This makes it easy to execute commands in the container,
e.g.
$ echo reboot | socat unix:<path-to-container>/var/lib/root-shell.socket -
This reverts commit b792394119.
Starting the manual on tty8 was intended as a convenience during
installation, not as a general purpose thing. In fact, given that w3m
runs as root, this is highly insecure!
