Hi fedora-devel, This morning I set out to set up a VM for web development for a project I've been working on so I could access my development environment from multiple locations / workstations without having to set it up again and again on different systems.
I had a surprisingly difficult time in doing this. The steps I followed, wanting to interact with the VM via virt-manager [1]: - Look at Atomic website page, find link for cloud images, try image advertised as libvirt (was a box image), try to import into virt-manager, fail (not a bootable image) - Realize that was a dumb move and try again with raw image. Tried to import into virt-manager, didn't know I have to decompress manually first. Fail. (not a bootable image) - Give up on Fedora base cloud image, try server. 3GB download, takes 30 min to install. Install concludes with somehow either crashing the hypervisor or disconnecting virt-manager from the hypervisor. - Realize how heavyweight server seems and it's not going to be good for something I really wanted to be lean and clean, esp when seeing stuff like snappy scroll by in the package install list (nothing against snappy, just not smtg I'd expect in a lean webdev env) - Get help in an irc development channel, learn I have to extract the raw image, hurrah, quick results except! Boot stalls. - Found out it's cloud-info stalling the boot. - Yay I have a login prompt! What's the login info? Gahhhh... - Realize have to run virt-customize --uninstall cloud-init --root-password password:whatever --selinux-relabel -a theimage - Success finally (ETA 1.5 hrs not 100% fully attended of course) Note that: - I searched the Fedora docs, website, ask Fedora, and did general searches at each point of failure and didn't find much in the way of guidance. Only in talking to a couple of knowledegable and helpful folks in real time was I able to get past the fail points. - Something else to note that's non obvious is setting up virt manager as non-root, first answer https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/45805/how-to-use-virt-manager-as-a-non-root-user/ OK so my questions for you, Fedora development community: - Is running a lightweight local VM for web development a usecase we want to support? Is it dare I ask important? - If so, is what I ended up setting up what we want people in that usecase to do? (E.g. use Fedora cloud base image, set up in virt-manager or boxes, using virt-customize to remove cloud-init and configure login password? If yes to both, I would be happy to help improving docs / websites / etc. to support the use case as well as filing some RFEs in the tools to make the experience better (e.g., if virt-manager could recognize a compressed raw image and offer to decompress it or at least tell user to do so, would be a win, for example.) But if I'm doing something edge-casey or not meant to be done, obviously that's a wasted effort. Let me know what you think! Cheers, ~m [1] Note I used virt-manager bc other webdevs I know use it and I'm familiar with using it for connecting to remote hypervisors which was a main thing I wanted to do. Happy to use Boxes if it allows that since it looks so slick, don't know enough about it to know if it does! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
