Initial daily packages for Incus

Introduction

Ever since announcing Incus, one of the most asked questions was when would we have packages available. And that’s even before we have our first stable release out!

This week I finally dedicated some time to getting us automated daily builds which will now be available moving forward for Debian 11, Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Similar to my kernel and ZFS builds, those will be built for both x86_64 and aarch64.

Once we do have a stable release of Incus out, a separate repository for stable builds will also be added. For now, this is only daily builds which are put out there without any testing, so here by dragons!

Instructions

The up to date installation instructions can be found here:

It’s very similar to the kernel and ZFS builds and is signed by the same GPG key, so it’s easy to have all of them on the same system and benefit from the testing being done across them.

NOTE: Once installed, you’ll have to run incusd init, at least for another few more days while we work on rolling out the new incus admin init that will replace it.

Bugs about the packages themselves can be reported at: https://github.com/zabbly/incus/issues

What’s next

As mentioned in today’s YouTube livestream, those packages are very bare at this point.

They do include all the bits needed for Incus, from LXC and LXCFS, to Cowsql, to QEMU and EDK2, but the system integration is still pretty minimal at this stage. There needs to be some work to ensure that things like bash completion works properly, update the systemd units to do proper socket activation, tweak the migration tool to cover more use cases and in general ensure that this is stable across the board.

But having packages at all, unblocks a lot of work we’ve been wanting to do on our CI as we now can just deploy a clean system, add the repository and install a daily build without having to manually build everything from source!

So expect the package to get a whole lot better over the coming days, leading to packaging that will be suitable for the first Incus release when the time comes for that.