Show HN: A lightweight UI to manage my LXC dev environments

A lightweight, stateful web interface for managing Linux Containers (LXC) on Debian/Ubuntu servers. It provides a safe, modern UI to manage container lifecycles, network rules, and backups without needing complex orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Proxmox.

🚀 Features

📦 Container Management

Lifecycle Control: Start, Stop, Freeze, and Delete containers.
One-Click Creation: Download and deploy generic Linux distro images (Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine).

🛡️ Network Orchestrator

Port Forwarding (DNAT): Visual manager for iptables.
Safe Architecture: Uses a custom sidecar chain (LXC_MANAGER) to avoid messing up system-level rules.
Static IPs: Manage DHCP leases for containers directly from the UI.

💾 Backup & Persistence

Container Snapshots: One-click backup of entire containers to a secondary disk (HDD/SSD).
Stateful Config: All settings and rules are stored in a local SQLite database (lxc_manager.db).
Config Safety: Automatically backs up /etc/iptables.up.rules and DHCP configs before applying changes.

🛠️ Architecture

Backend: Python (FastAPI) + SQLite (SQLModel)
Frontend: Vue.js 3 + Tailwind CSS (Single HTML file)
System Integration:
Direct lxc-* command execution / Python bindings.
Direct iptables chain management.
Systemd integration for network persistence.

⚡ Installation

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/your-username/lxc-simple-manager.git
cd lxc-simple-manager

Install System Dependencies:

sudo apt install python3-lxc lxc lxc-net bridge-utils

Setup Environment:

# Create venv with access to system packages (crucial for python3-lxc)
python3 -m venv venv --system-site-packages

# Install Python deps
./venv/bin/pip install -r backend/requirements.txt

Migrate Existing Rules (Optional): If you have existing iptables rules you want to import into the database:

sudo ./venv/bin/python3 import_rules.py

🚀 Usage

The manager needs root privileges to control LXC and IPTables.

sudo ./run.sh

Web Interface: http://<SERVER_IP>:8001
API Docs: http://<SERVER_IP>:8001/docs

⚠️ Security Note

This tool runs as root and exposes system-level controls.

Do not expose this port to the public internet.

Folders and files

Latest commit

History