Custom container templates in Proxmox
After finally purchasing some hardware that is powerful enough to run many things at once (to replace my aging set of raspberries pi and my lenovo thin clients), I figured I’d also switch over from using a mix of running-on-bare-metal and everything else in very long single Docker compose file and install proxmox because apparently I have no self-worth and like to make things complicated.
While I’m waiting for the rest of the hardware to arrive (namely an SSD to stick in the server), I figured I’d mess around with proxmox and create some lxc containers. After making one or two I noticed that there a few tools that I would like by default installed that aren’t in the pre-build images, and don’t exist in the other tool images they provide, namely:
- avahi for zeroconf dns
- tailscaled for easier remote management
So I realized I needed to look into creating a new container template. Unfortunately, like most things even moderately difficult, search engines are a complete failure when trying to find this, however I was able to cobble together what is going on here from a variety of proxmox forum and reddit posts, along with the docs for distrobuilder, so for future sake, here’s what you need to do.
- Install distrobuilder and it’s requirements. I already have go installed and configured via asdf, so I omitted that package from the list.
- Grab a template from the distrobuilder repo (or make your own, but I’m pretty lazy)
- Edit the template to include what you want pre-installed. (I also added
lunaras a target and told it to use that as my release) - Run
sudo ~/go/bin/distrobuilder build-lxc ubuntu.yaml(or where ever distrobuilder was installed to) - For some reason proxmox can only use these templates if they’re compressed with
zstd. I’m sure there’s some configuration flag to tell distrobuilder to do this, but we can also just do it with the CLIs:xz -dc rootfs.tar.xz | zstd -o ubuntu-home-lab.tar.zst - Copy that file to
/var/lib/vz/template/cache/on your proxmox machine (or use the GUI and upload it that way).
Now you’ve got your own container template. Which turns out is just the rootfs output from distrobuilder.