transient is thin wrapper for QEMU that provides additional features like downloading
disk images, shared folders, and SSH support. Currently transient only supports
Vagrant libvirt images.
transient is available on PyPI, so the latest
release can be installed with pip install transient. To install transient from
source, clone this repository and run pip install -e '.[dev]' from the project
root. As always, the usage of python virtual environments
is recommended for a development setup.
transient has dependencies on very few packages. On ubuntu, these can be installed
by running apt-get install ssh qemu-system-x86 python3-pip.
Documentation for transient is available on Read the Docs.
transient is primarily a wrapper for QEMU. It supplies a small set of flags that
are used to add additional features to the VM being started. As the name implies,
it is almost completely stateless. This avoids problems that can sometimes occur
with libvirt based tools becoming 'unsynchronized' with the real system state.
For example, in the following command, the flags before the -- are passed to
transient. The remaining arguments are passed directly to QEMU. This example
will cause transient to download and run a Centos7 VM (from the Vagrant Cloud)
with 1GB of memory using a text console. This virtual machine will be automatically
shut down on exit and its disk will be destroyed.
transient run \
-image centos/7:2004.01 \
-- \
-nographic -enable-kvm -m 1G
transient also supports a vagrant style SSH connection. This will start the
virtual machine and connect standard input and output to an SSH connection
with the machine, instead of the serial console. However, when this connection
is closed, the machine will be automatically shut down (unlike vagrant). For
example:
transient run \
-ssh-console \
-image centos/7:2004.01 \
-- \
-enable-kvm -m 1G
The -ssh-console flag depends on the image having the normal vagrant keypair
trusted for the vagrant user.