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Installation

Choose your release

LXD upstream maintains different release branches in parallel:

  • Long term support (LTS) releases: currently LXD 5.0.x and LXD 4.0.x
  • Feature releases: LXD 5.x

LTS releases are recommended for production environments as they will benefit from regular bugfix and security updates but will not see new features added or any kind of behavioral change.

To get all the latest features and monthly updates to LXD, use the feature release branch instead.

Installing a package

Linux

The easiest way to install LXD on Linux is to install the snap package, which is available for different Linux distributions.

If this option does not work for you, see the other installation options.

Snap package

LXD upstream publishes and tests snap packages that work for a number of Linux distributions, for example, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE.

Complete the following steps to install the snap:

  1. Check the provided distributions to see if a snap is available for your Linux distribution.
    If it is not, use one of the other installation options.

  2. Install snapd. See the installation instructions on snapcraft.io.

  3. Install the snap package.
    For the latest feature release, use:

    sudo snap install lxd

    For the LXD 5.0 LTS release, use:

    sudo snap install lxd --channel=5.0/stable

For more information about LXD snap packages (regarding more versions, update management etc.), see Managing the LXD snap.

Note

On Ubuntu 18.04, if you previously had the LXD deb package installed, you can migrate all your existing data over with:

sudo lxd.migrate

Other installation options

Some Linux distributions provide installation options other than the snap package.

To install the feature branch of LXD on Alpine Linux, run:

apk add lxd

To install the feature branch of LXD on Arch Linux, run:

pacman -S lxd

Fedora RPM packages for LXC/LXD are available in the COPR repository.

To install the LXD package for the feature branch, run:

dnf copr enable ganto/lxc4
dnf install lxd

See the Installation Guide for more detailed installation instructions.

To install the feature branch of LXD on Gentoo, run:

emerge --ask lxd

Other operating systems

Note

The builds for other operating systems include only the client, not the server.

LXD upstream publishes builds of the LXD client for macOS through Homebrew.

To install the feature branch of LXD, run:

brew install lxc

The LXD client on Windows is provided as a Chocolatey package. To install it:

  1. Install Chocolatey by following the installation instructions.

  2. Install the LXD client:

    choco install lxc

You can also find native builds of the LXD client on GitHub. To download a specific build:

  1. Make sure that you are logged into your GitHub account.
  2. Filter for the branch or tag that you are interested in (for example, the latest release tag or master).
  3. Select the latest build and download the suitable artifact.

Installing from source

To build and install LXD from source, follow the instructions in Installing LXD from source.

Initial configuration

Before you can create a LXD instance (a container or a virtual machine), you must configure LXD.

See How to initialize LXD for instructions.

Security and access control

Access control for LXD is based on group membership. The root user and all members of the lxd group can interact with the local daemon.

If the lxd group is missing on your system, create it and restart the LXD daemon. You can then add trusted users to the group. Anyone added to this group will have full control over LXD.

Because group membership is normally only applied at login, you might need to either re-open your user session or use the newgrp lxd command in the shell you're using to talk to LXD.

Warning

Anyone with access to the LXD socket can fully control LXD, which includes the ability to attach host devices and file systems. Therefore, you should only give access to users who would be trusted with root access to the host.

You can learn more about LXD security here.

Firewall issues

You might see issues with your firewall blocking network access for your instances, or connectivity issues because you run LXD and Docker on the same host.

See How to configure your firewall for information on how to resolve such issues.

Instances

See Instances.

Images

See Images.

Further information & links

You find more information on the following pages:

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