nsg's blog

Import a qcow2 image to LXD

2022-01-29

I recently learned how to make my own LXD VM image based on Home Assistant's QCOW2 VM images. This blog post is a short write-up how to do that! This is of course useful for other qcow2 images as well.

Download a image

I downloaded the Home Assistant OS image in the qcow2 format, and uncompressed it. The image is intended for KVM, and LXD runs VM:s with Qemu/KVM so it's a good fit for LXD VM:s.

$ wget https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/download/7.1/haos_ova-7.1.qcow2.xz
$ xz -d haos_ova-7.1.qcow2.xz

Write a metadata.yaml file

LXD need some metadata, the format is documented here. A minimal example that I used for Home Assistant can be found below:

architecture: x86_64
creation_date: 1643062675
properties:
  description: Home Assistant OS 7.1
  os: HAOS
  release: 7

Save it as metadata.yaml, and make it a tarball with:

$ tar cf metadata.tar metadata.yaml

Import the image

Import the image as haos with an image import:

$ lxc image import metadata.tar haos_ova-7.1.qcow2 --alias haos

Launch it!

That's all, now start it like any other VM with the --vm flag. LXD will only launch signed images with secure boot by default, to disable that add -c security.secureboot=false. The full command I used to launch this specific VM was:

$ lxc init haos homeassistant --vm \
  -c security.secureboot=false \
  -c limits.cpu=2 \
  -c limits.memory=4GiB

That's all!

Pages that link here are Run Home Assistant OS inside LXD and they may be relevant. All these 253 words are written by Stefan Berggren, feel free and contact me if you like.