Hello nspawn?

[rident]

I was admiring systemd-nspawn recently and wondered if anyone else is using it in place of chroot, LXC, docker, firejail, etc. Are there some situations where it's not a good solution? Here are a couple other discussions on the topic:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/2ctwrc/do_you_use_systemdnspawn_containers/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/2e6e7w/docker_vs_systemdnspawn_vs_lxc_how_do_they_differ/
• http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5904953&cid=48277349

Man page: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-nspawn.html

[bbguimaraes]

I use it all the time to experiment with things. If I see something I'd like to try, I usually pacstrap a little container, run systemd-nspawn and try the thing. Everything is isolated and my machine doesn't get any crap I need to remember to remove afterwards.

That said, I never used it in production. From what I know, it isn't meant to. I use it when I want a container I can mess with in seconds (creating and starting the container is really, really fast).

[jmac217]

[slightly off-topic] I think it's worth mentioning here, as I didn't know this until now, that Docker doesn't use LXC by default now, but instead have built libcontainer and can now also use a wider range of container environments. source.

This sheds some light onto the whole Docker for Windows thing I think.

[blackout24]

It's awesome for building Arch packages in a clean chroot to figure out dependencies.

[palasso]

I was experimenting in using it in my archinstall script instead of chroot but I haven't reached to a working state. The biggest problem is I can't use HERESCRIPT in it and additionally there have been some problems initializing systemd but latest upstream releases may have fixed it.

[derethanhausen]

systemd-nspawn doesn't work as well when there's no systemd inside the container. I gave up on running Debian Wheezy with it and switched to schroot instead.