How to install Incus

Packages are available for a number of Linux distributions, either in their main repository or through third party repositories.

Important

The builds for other operating systems include only the client, not the server.

You can also find native builds of the Incus client on GitHub:

These instructions for building from source are suitable for individual developers who want to build the latest version of Incus, or build a specific release of Incus which may not be offered by their Linux distribution. Source builds for integration into Linux distributions are not covered here and may be covered in detail in a separate document in the future.

This will download the current development tree of Incus and place you in the source tree. Then proceed to the instructions below to actually build and install Incus.

The Incus release tarballs bundle a complete dependency tree as well as a local copy of libraft and libcowsql for Incus’ database setup.

This will unpack the release tarball and place you inside of the source tree. Then proceed to the instructions below to actually build and install Incus.

The actual building is done by two separate invocations of the Makefile: make deps – which builds libraries required by Incus – and make, which builds Incus itself. At the end of make deps, a message will be displayed which will specify environment variables that should be set prior to invoking make. As new versions of Incus are released, these environment variable settings may change, so be sure to use the ones displayed at the end of the make deps process, as the ones below (shown for example purposes) may not exactly match what your version of Incus requires:

We recommend having at least 2GiB of RAM to allow the build to complete.

~$ ``make deps

...``make[1]: Leaving directory '/root/go/deps/cowsql'``# environment``Please set the following in your environment (possibly ~/.bashrc)``#  export CGO_CFLAGS="${CGO_CFLAGS} -I$(go env GOPATH)/deps/cowsql/include/ -I$(go env GOPATH)/deps/raft/include/"``#  export CGO_LDFLAGS="${CGO_LDFLAGS} -L$(go env GOPATH)/deps/cowsql/.libs/ -L$(go env GOPATH)/deps/raft/.libs/"``#  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(go env GOPATH)/deps/cowsql/.libs/:$(go env GOPATH)/deps/raft/.libs/:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"``#  export CGO_LDFLAGS_ALLOW="(-Wl,-wrap,pthread_create)|(-Wl,-z,now)"

~$ ``make

Once the build completes, you simply keep the source tree, add the directory referenced by $(go env GOPATH)/bin to your shell path, and set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable printed by make deps to your environment. This might look something like this for a ~/.bashrc file:

Now, the incusd and incus binaries will be available to you and can be used to set up Incus. The binaries will automatically find and use the dependencies built in $(go env GOPATH)/deps thanks to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.

You’ll need sub{u,g}ids for root, so that Incus can create the unprivileged containers:

Now you can run the daemon (the --group sudo bit allows everyone in the sudo group to talk to Incus; you can create your own group if you want):

Note

If newuidmap/newgidmap tools are present on your system and /etc/subuid, etc/subgid exist, they must be configured to allow the root user a contiguous range of at least 10M UID/GID.