Initial Setup of nc-env in Debian 11

Introduction

This document describes the step-by-step procedure for the initial setup of nc-env in a Debian 11 system.

Check the project homepage to know more about nc-env.

Software Environment

Procedure

Install all the software needed for the project, starting by updating the package repositories:

$ sudo apt update

The following packages are not strictly needed, but may make the following operations more agile, depending on the user tooling preferences.

$ sudo apt install vim tree

LXD Installation

LXD will be installed as a snap, and snap is not pre-installed in the system. So let's install snap first, then install the required snap core.

$ sudo apt install snapd

$ sudo snap install core

Now you can install LXD using snap:

$ sudo snap install lxd --channel=5.0/stable
lxd 5.0.0-b0287c1 from Canonical✓ installed

Verify that LXD has been correctly installed:

$ snap list lxd
Name  Version        Rev    Tracking       Publisher   Notes
lxd   5.0.0-b0287c1  22923  latest/stable  canonical✓  -

ZFS Utilities Installation

You can find more extensive ZFS setup instructions here.

While it is recommeded to use ZFS as backend for the LXD storage pools for this project, you can skip this section if you plan to use directory-based LXD storage pools.

If you plan to use ZFS as backend for the LXD storage pools, you should have a disk or unformatted partition, of 20GB or more, for that.

Add the repository where the ZFS packages live:

$ sudo apt-add-repository contrib

Then install the package zfsutils-linux:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

You can check the the package has been successfully installed by running the following command:

$ sudo zpool --version
zfs-2.0.3-9
zfs-kmod-2.0.3-9

Vagrant Installation

Install curl:

$ sudo apt install curl

Get the Hashicorp signing key into the system (instructions taken from the official Hashicorp Vagrant download page):

$ sudo curl -fsSL https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the official repository for vagrant:

$ sudo apt-add-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main"
$ sudo apt update

Install the vagrant package:

$ sudo apt install vagrant

Verify that it has been correctly installed:

$ vagrant --version
Vagrant 2.2.19

Vagrant-lxd plugin Installation

Vagrant plugins are installed by using the plugin switch, so let's install the vagrant-lxd plugin by issuing the following command:

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-lxd
Installing the 'vagrant-lxd' plugin. This can take a few minutes...
Fetching thread_safe-0.3.6.gem
Fetching tzinfo-1.2.9.gem
Fetching minitest-5.15.0.gem
Fetching activesupport-5.2.7.gem
Fetching multipart-post-2.1.1.gem
Fetching faraday-0.17.5.gem
Fetching public_suffix-4.0.7.gem
Fetching addressable-2.8.0.gem
Fetching sawyer-0.9.1.gem
Fetching hyperkit-1.3.0.gem
Fetching vagrant-lxd-0.5.6.gem
Installed the plugin 'vagrant-lxd (0.5.6)'!

Verify that it has been correctly installed:

$ vagrant plugin list
vagrant-lxd (0.5.6, global)

As recommended in the vagrant-lxd documentation (here), to ensure synced folders work as expected, run the following commands:

$ echo root:$(id -u):1 | sudo tee -a /etc/subuid
$ echo root:$(id -g):1 | sudo tee -a /etc/subgid

Mkcert Installation

Download from the official repository the latest released binary of mkcert, an utility that makes it easy to create locally trusted TLS certificates:

$ pwd
/home/fedora_usr/Documents/nc-env/
$ mkdir my-local-env
$ cd my-local-env
$ wget https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/releases/download/v1.4.4/mkcert-v1.4.4-linux-amd64

Install a needed dependency for mkcert:

$ sudo dnf install nss-tools

Rename the mkcert binary by stripping the version:

$ mv mkcert-v1.4.4-linux-amd64 mkcert

Make it executable:

$ chmod +x mkcert

Run the install command

$ ./mkcert -install
The local CA is already installed in the system trust store! 👍
The local CA is now installed in the Firefox and/or Chrome/Chromium trust store (requires browser restart)! 🦊

Check the local CAROOT folder by issuing the following command. We will need to make the files in that folder available to the containers as well:

$ ./mkcert -CAROOT

Nc-env Installation

Pick the latest release of the project from here, in this example v20220421:

$ wget https://codeberg.org/pmarini/nc-env/archive/v20220421.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf v20220421.tar
$ cd nc-env/

Next steps

Please refer to section "LXD Configuration" in guide How-To-Setup-Nc-Env-In-Ubuntu-Desktop.md for the following steps.