How to install and configure LXD on POP_OS

3 min readJun 23, 2021

What’s LXD?|

LXD is a next-generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using Linux containers instead.

It’s image-based with pre-made images available for a wide number of Linux distributions and is built around a very powerful, yet pretty simple, REST API.

To get a better idea of what LXD is and what it does, you can try it online! Then if you want to run it locally, take a look at our getting started guide.

The LXD project was founded and is currently led by Canonical Ltd with contributions from a range of other companies and individual contributors.

Step 1 — Install LXD on POP_OS

First, as always, check if there are any pending updates to install on POP_OS

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

To start the installation of LXC

sudo apt install lxd

Usually, for testing, the purpose selects the latest version else picks 4.0 for stable servers on the next screen

Step 2 — Add user to the LXD group for management purpose

No need to be the root user to manage LXD daemon. To manage LXD server add your username to lxd group using the adduser command:

sudo adduser $USER lxd.

The group membership is only applied at the next login, or a new ssh session started. Hence, either you need to close and re-open your user/ssh session or use the following newgrp command:

newgrp lxd

Verify membership details with the id command:

id | grep lxd

Test it with the lxc command:

lxc list

Step 3 — Set up and configure LXD networking and storage options

Now that we installed LXD, it is time to set up the LXD server. You must configure networking and storage option such as directory, DIR, ZFS, Btrfs, and more, enter:

sudo lxd init

Next, you must answer a series of questions on how to configure the LXD server, including the storage and networking option. Here is a sample as you can starting your settings.