Installation
============

To install Incus with support for creating both containers and virtual machines, run:

    sudo apt install incus

If you only wish to create containers in Incus and don't want the additional dependencies
required for running virtual machines, you can install just the base package:

    sudo apt install incus-base

Incus initialization
====================

If you wish to migrate existing containers or VMs from LXD, please refer to the next
section. Otherwise, after installing Incus you must perform an initial configuration:

    sudo incus admin init

Migrating from LXD
==================

Incus includes a tool named `lxd-to-incus`, included in the "incus-extra" package,
which can be used to convert an existing LXD installation into an Incus one.

For this to work properly, you should install Incus but not initialize it. Instead,
make sure that both `incus info` and `lxc info` both work properly, then run
`lxd-to-incus` to migrate your data.

This process transfers the entire database and all storage from LXD to Incus,
resulting in an identical setup after the migration.

For further information, please visit https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/server_migrate_lxd/

WARNING: This should be considered a destructive action from LXD's perspective.
Afterwards the LXD daemon may not properly start, and running `lxc list` will be
empty. It is recommend that the LXD packages be purged as part of running
`lxd-to-incus`, or by hand immediately following the migration.

Configuration
=============

Incus's default bridge networking requires the dnsmasq-base package to be
installed. If you chose to install Incus without its recommended packages and
intend to use the default bridge, you must first install dnsmasq-base for
networking to work correctly.

If you wish to allow non-root users to interact with Incus via the local Unix
socket, you must add them to the incus group:

    sudo usermod -aG incus <username>

Access via the incus group grants restricted access to Incus, allowing members to run
most commands, except `incus admin`. For the vast majority of use cases, this is the
preferred setup.

Alternatively, if you wish to allow non-root users full administrative access to
Incus via the local Unix socket, you must add them to the incus-admin group:

    sudo usermod -aG incus-admin <username>

From the upstream documentation (https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/security/),
be aware that local access to Incus through the Unix socket via the incus-admin group
always grants full access to Incus. This includes the ability to attach file system
paths or devices to any instance as well as tweak the security features on any
instance. Therefore, you should only give access to users who would be trusted with
root access to the host.

Init scripts
============

systemd, SysV, and runit init scripts are provided, but the SysV and runit scripts
aren't as well-tested as the systemd ones. Bug reports and patches are welcome to
improve the Incus experience on non-systemd installs.

Non-systemd required configuration
----------------------------------

When installing Incus on a non-systemd host, you must ensure that a cgroup v2
hierarchy is mounted prior to starting Incus. One possible way to do this is to
add a line like the following to your /etc/fstab:

    cgroup2   /sys/fs/cgroup   cgroup2   rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec   0 0

Additionally, the "incus-user" service is not automatically started after install to allow
the local administrator to first run `incus admin init`. After performing initialization,
you can then enable/start the "incus-user" service. This is needed because if "incus-user"
starts before Incus has been configured it will create a minimal empty profile which then
conflicts with running `incus admin init`. (Hosts running systemd avoid this by relying on
socket-based activation for the "incus" and "incus-user" services.)

Logging
=======

By default, the Incus daemon will log to /var/log/incus/incus.log. If you wish to log
instead to the host system's configured rsyslog daemon, set USE_SYSLOG=yes in
/etc/default/incus and restart the service.

When using the runit scripts, Incus logs will always be written to
/var/log/runit/incus/current.

Storage backends
================

Incus supports several storage backends. When installing, Incus will suggest the
necessary packages to enable all storage backends, but in brief:

  * btrfs requires the btrfs-progs package
  * ceph/cephfs require the ceph-common package
  * lvm requires the lvm2 package
  * zfs requires the zfsutils-linux package

After installing one or more of those additional packages, be sure to restart
the Incus service so it picks up the additional storage backend(s).

Virtual machines
================

Incus optionally can create virtual machine instances utilizing QEMU. Because Incus
configures QEMU to use host CPU passthrough, emulation of a different architecture than
the host system is not supported. For example, an amd64 host can create both amd64 and
i386 virtual machines, but cannot create an arm64 virtual machine.

Currently, only amd64, arm64, ppc64el, and s390x are supported as host architectures
for running virtual machines.

To enable this capability, on the host system ensure that the "incus" package is
installed and then restart the Incus service. You will now be able to create virtual
machine instances by passing the `--vm` flag in your creation command.

Operating systems supported by incus-agent
------------------------------------------

incus-agent is available for FreeBSD, Linux, MacOS, and Windows operating systems. When
creating a virtual machine for one of these OSes, information about process load, network
configuration, and resource utilization will be automatically reported, and you can use
the `incus exec` and `incus file` commands to directly interact with the virtual machine.

RHEL (and derivatives)
----------------------

RHEL does not ship the 9p kernel module, which is used to dynamically mount
instance-specific agent configuration and the incus-agent binary into VMs. To work
around this, Incus added a new agent drive, providing those files through what looks
like a CD-ROM drive rather than being retrieved over a networked filesystem.

For example, to run CentOS 9-Stream, one now needs to do:

    incus create images:centos/9-Stream centos --vm
    incus config device add centos agent disk source=agent:config
    incus start centos

For further details, please see the Incus 0.5.1 release notes (https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/incus-0-5-1-has-been-released/18848).

Windows VMs
-----------

When running a Windows VM, it is recommended to set the VM's `image.os` configuration
field to include the string "Windows". This allows Incus to hide some unsupported
devices and configure an appropriate incus-agent binary for the VM.

Known issues
============

  * Running Incus and Docker on the same host can cause connectivity issues. A
common reason for these issues is that Docker sets the FORWARD policy to DROP,
which prevents Incus from forwarding traffic and thus causes the instances to lose
network connectivity. There are two different ways you can fix this:

    - As outlined in bug #865975, message 91, you can add `net.ipv4.ip_forward=1`
      to /etc/sysctl.conf which will create a FORWARD policy that docker can
      use. Docker then won't set the FORWARD chain to DROP when it starts up.

    - Alternately, you can use the following command to explicitly allow
      network traffic from your network bridge to your external network
      interface:
      `iptables -I DOCKER-USER -i <network_bridge> -o <external_interface> -j ACCEPT`
      (from the upstream Incus documentation at
       https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/howto/network_bridge_firewalld/)

  * If the apparmor package is not installed on the host system, containers
will fail to start unless their configuration is modified to include
`lxc.apparmor.profile=unconfined`; this has been reported upstream at
https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues/4150.
