Installing LXC from source code on a CentOS 7 host, and configuring

1. Before beginning to install LXC, the pre-requisite package libcap-devel should be installed. This assumes Yum configured on host already.

# yum install libcap-devel

2. Unzip LXC source code.

# tar -zxvf lxc-1.1.5.tar.gz
# cd lxc-1.1.5

3. Install with following commands. By default, LXC will be installed in /usr/local directory. So, we have to mention correct directory names by specifying options for ./configure command.

# ./autogen.sh
# ./configure --enable-capabilities --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var
# make
# make install

4. Add following configuration information in /etc/sysconfig/lxc-net (new file) to configure networking for LXC host.

LXC_BRIDGE="lxcbr0"
USE_LXC_BRIDGE="true"

LXC_ADDR="192.168.2.1"
LXC_NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
LXC_DHCP_RANGE="192.168.2.70,192.168.2.99"

5. Add following line in /root/.bash_profile and /etc/init.d/lxc-net files to make LXC libraries available for startup script and environment.

# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib

6. Start the service lxc-net and make it autostart during system boot.

# service lxc-net start
# chkconfig lxc-net on

7. Verify if lxcbr0 interface is showing up in ifconfig output.

# ifconfig
....
lxcbr0: flags=4163  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.2.1  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 0.0.0.0
....

8. Add following line in /etc/lxc/lxc.conf (new file) to specify where all containers' root file systems should be stored.

lxc.lxcpath = /vm