Building and publishing Launchpad Development LXD Images

A rebuild of images are are required if we introduce new external dependencies in lp:lp-source-deps. Also, its recommended to rebuild the image at least once every month so that the launchpad clone in the image is relatively updated. Currently, we only build Launchpad LXD Dev Images for Focal (amd64). As there are no community LXD servers or Launchpad team’s self hosted servers to publish the LXD images. We are currently using Google Drive to build and publish images.

Launchpad uses LXD Image Builder and debootstrap package to build LXD images. The image file can be found at the lpdev-image-file.yaml in the Launchpad repository.

You can install them as follows:

sudo snap install --edge --classic lxd-imagebuilder
sudo add-apt-repository -y universe
sudo apt -y update
sudo apt -y install debootstrap

Build Process

Make sure you have LXD Image Builder installed. Follow the installation process here.

make build-lxd-image

Publishing Steps

Above command will output a tar.xz file that should be replaced with the existing image file on Google Drive.

Notes

The current LXD image only runs the basic web application. Future plan is to have Codehosting and Soyuz as a part of this image.