I needed to familiarize myself with the API and its behavior and doing this locally rather than over a VPN on some production system with a QA tenant would make things a lot easier.

I could have used Devstack. Devstack is great if you are developing OpenStack. That is for what it is made. It uses the OpenStack source. That seemed overkill to me.

What I ended up with is a cloud-config file which I pass to cloud-init on system start. I use LXD to start a container. In less than 2 minutes later, on my 10 year old home server, I have swift up and running and responding to my commands.

$ lxc launch -e ubuntu:16.04 $(petname) -c user.user-data="$(cat swift.yaml)"
Creating testy-Abril
Starting testy-Abril
$ lxc list
+-----------------+---------+-----------------------+-+-----------+---+
| testy-Abril     | RUNNING | 10.0.5.169 (eth0)     | | EPHEMERAL | 0 |
+-----------------+---------+-----------------------+-+-----------+---+
$ swift --user admin:admin --key
admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 upload t README.md
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list
t
$ swift --user admin:admin --key admin -A http://10.0.5.169:8080/auth/v1.0 list t
README.md

No need to ssh into the container at all. Just start it, wait a bit for things to install, and a swift API is up and running.

The swift.yaml file is here on github and the only change you should make is either remove the last line or change it to import your key so you can ssh to it.

Since then, LXD became the best way to use LXC.

By default, LXD already uses ubuntu-cloudimg images.

The lesser know feature is using cloud-config with LXD. It turns out it is very easy to pass user-data to an LXD instance when you start it, just like you would on any cloud provider.

LXD even has the -e option to make your LXD instance ephemeral. It will be deleted automatically when you stop it.

Just like in that previous blog post, I create a file named one.yaml. The name can be anything. Then i start it:

lxc launch ubuntu:14.04 crisp-Hadley -c user.user-data="$(cat one.yaml)"

That is all there is to it.

Here is an example of config similar to what I used recently to QA a build configuration:

#cloud-config
output:
 all: "|tee -a /tmp/cloud.out"
#hostname: {{ hostname }}
bootcmd:
 - rm -f /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch
apt_sources:
 - source: ppa:yellow/ppa
ssh_import_id: [evarlast] # use -S option
packages:
 - make
final_message: "The system is finally up, after $UPTIME seconds"
runcmd:
 - cd /home/ubuntu
 - git clone https://www.github.com/jrwren/myproject
 - cd myproject
 - make deps run