Libct is a containers management library which provides convenient API for frontend programs to rule a container during its whole lifetime.

The library operates on two entities:

• session -- everyone willing to work with container must first open a session. Currently there is only one type of session -- local, when all containers are created as child tasks of the caller using namespaces, cgroups etc.;

• container -- a container. By default container is "empty", when started it is merely a fork()-ed process. Container can be equipped with various things, e.g.

  • Namespaces. Libct accepts clone mask with which container is started

  • Controllers. One may configure all existing CGroup controllers inside which container will be started.

  • Root on a filesystem. This is a directory into which container will be chroot()-ed (or pivot_root()-ed if mount namespace is used).

  • Private area. This is where the files for container are. Currently only one type is supported -- a directory that will be bind-mounted into root.

  • Network. Caller may assign host NIC of veth pair's end to container on start.

For more details, see Documentation/libct.txt. For usage examples, see test directory. All the API calls, types and constants are collected in src/include/uapi/libct.h.

Currently, libct depends on libnl which is configured as a git submodule. So, before trying to compile libct for the first time you need to prepare libnl first:

git submodule update --init --recursive
(cd .shipped/libnl/ && ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make)

Once it is done, please compile as usual, i.e.

make