Stuck with LXC container autostart? We can help you.

LXC container autostart is mainly used to select which containers to start. And when the host system boots, it also decides the order and the delay between each startup.

At Bobcares, we often get requests regarding LXC containers, as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s see how our Support Engineers help customers with LXC container autostart.

Take a look at LXC Container

LXC is abbreviated as Linux Containers. Containers mainly help in modularizing services or applications.

By default, containers come as a solution when there is a problem with the reliability of running any software. It eases out moving it from one computing environment to another.

The main aim of the LXC container is to create an environment that is possibly close to a standard Linux installation but without the requirement for a separate kernel. Thus replicating the settings will no longer be a hassle.

LXC container autostart – What it means?

It’s now time to see the autostart option in LXC containers.

This Autostart option means marking the containers to start at boot time. This is supported by LXC and it also supports the Grouping and ordering of the containers, reboot and shut down by autostart groups, etc.

How we do it?

After a server reboot, the LXC containers do not start itself by default.

To change that, we use the lxc-autostart tool and containers’ configuration file.

Recently, one of our customers approached us with a requirement to set autostart for his LXC containers. Our Support Engineers followed the steps below for setting autostart.

We added the following in the configuration file ‘/var/lib/lxc/name/config‘.

We set autostart in a way that, the system should wait for 5 seconds before starting the next container. So we set ‘lxc.start.delay = 5‘ in configuration.

We also handled a case where the customer was using Ubuntu without a Proxmox. So, our Engineers did the following. In the particular configuration file /var/lib/lxc/name/config, we added:

lxc config set container_name boot.autostart true

Thus, we successfully set an autostart for the LXC container.

[Need assistance with LXC containers? We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

LXC container autostart is a quick way for automation. Today, we discussed in detail on LXC container auto-restart option and saw how our Support Engineers set this for our customers.