bluebluesodaandCommandCodeBot
26ef538ccc
The owner should notice nothing but their address, and that is now mostly true: the quota, the deadline, their SSH keys, their sticky notes and their init script travel with the archive in a small JSON file served next to it and checked against its own digest, so nothing has to be retyped on a command line or remembered from the old machine. The init script is written to the database and deliberately not run: it belongs to a reinstall, and a migration must not re-run whatever it did the first time. The root password is no longer reset either. It lives on the disk, its owner already knows it, and leaving it alone is the point of a migration that should feel like nothing happened — verified by logging into the moved container with the password set on the sending host before it moved. An account whose deadline has passed is refused outright, with the command to extend it: starting a container the panel has already locked and stopped is not something a transfer should do, and an expiry in the past would otherwise be recreated as a live account. The deadline travels as the absolute date it was, so moving neither gains nor loses time. The receiving host checks it has room before fetching anything: the metadata is small and comes first, and the disk figure in it is the sending host's own, the same number the export sized its temp file from. The account's settings are no longer passed as flags. --cpu/--mem/--disk/ --bandwidth/--days on `receive` are gone, along with the code that could have been used to shrink a disk on the way — quotas may exceed what the target has room for (the pool is over-committed by design, as it is for `vps add`), but a migration never reduces one. Two more things the real daemon taught us, both about the same DHCP handshake: - A container is handed its static IPv4 through a reservation keyed to its hardware address, written when the instance is created. Changing that address afterwards — which is what dropping the source's MAC did — leaves the reservation naming the old one, and the container then comes up on a dynamic address while every rule and record points at the static one. The fresh address is therefore set as part of the import, via X-Incus-config, where Incus will write the reservation around it. Confirmed on the wire: the configured, configured-in-the-guest and reserved addresses now agree, and the lease follows. - That address arrives over DHCP a moment after the container is up, later than Readiness means, so it is waited for rather than assumed, with one restart if the server is still holding the address of the container that was replaced. Verified on two hosts (Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, Incus 7.0.1, zfs): an account with a key, notes, an init script and a deadline moved with all four intact, the init script not run, the old root password still working, the transferred quota in place, its assigned static IPv4 taken and reachable over its published SSH port; an expired account refused on the sending side with nothing created; and a failed import rolled back to no account, no container and no files. Co-authored-by: CommandCodeBot <noreply@commandcode.ai>
Vpsmgr Lite
A lightweight Incus container hosting panel for small VPS instances and low-memory hosts.
Security warning: The “VMs” created by this project are LXC containers, not virtual machines. Container isolation is weaker than KVM/QEMU. A container escape or kernel vulnerability could affect the host and other tenants. Do not run untrusted or high-security workloads on a shared host.
Feature Details
- Admin panel: users, quotas, domains, IPv6 pool, SSH public keys, and audit logs; supports logging in as a user
- User panel: power control, self-service Debian 13/AlmaLinux 9/openSUSE Leap 16/Arch Linux reinstall, domain and SSH key management, encrypted sticky notes (exportable), and a time machine (checkpoint snapshots; rolling back discards the later checkpoints)
- Multi-container users: group accounts as
name+name-1,name-2, … to share one login and password across several containers, with a switcher and per-group accent color - The admin can assign each user a dedicated accent color (click the username in the user list): that user's "log in" button and user-panel background use it, so impersonating operators can tell users apart at a glance. A user group shares one color
- CPU, memory, and disk oversubscription; quota changes apply live without a container restart
- Strict container network isolation; prefix mode assigns each container a dedicated
/112IPv6 block that it can subdivide - Traffic is counted in both directions; over-quota containers are rate-limited to 1 Mbps both ways
- Compressed ZFS storage by default; the fixed instance limit is 200 containers
- Ports 80/443 forward to container ports 80/443; port 80 uses shared HTTP proxying and port 443 shared SNI proxying
Installation
Ubuntu 24.04 is recommended; Ubuntu 22+ and Debian 12+ also work. Debian requires a kernel-module build and takes longer to install.
Recommended minimum: 1 CPU core, 1 GB RAM, 15 GB of free disk space, and root access. Both amd64 and arm64 are supported; testing has focused mainly on amd64.
git clone https://github.com/bluebluesoda/vpsmgr.git
cd vpsmgr
sudo ./install.sh # download the latest prebuilt binary
# sudo ./install.sh --local-build # always build from this checkout
# sudo ./install.sh --update # update an existing install from the release
The installer first downloads the prebuilt binary from GitHub Releases. If that fails, it falls back to a local build. --local-build always rebuilds from source. If --update cannot download the release, the existing binary is left untouched.
If the host already runs other public services and you only need IPv6 inbound access, without IPv4 SSH/port forwarding, use:
sudo ./install.sh --disable-v4forward
This option asks for confirmation at the beginning. Once confirmed, it writes net.v4_forward=false, skips vpsmgr's reserved-port check, and only needs one randomly selected panel entry port. HAProxy is still installed but remains stopped. IPv4 inbound forwarding can later be restored with vps config set net.v4_forward true. The domain proxy can also be disabled on its own with vps config set net.haproxy false (renamed from net.traefik; the values are unchanged and a pre-rename config is adopted as-is).
ZFS is the default storage backend. btrfs is supported as an alternative
(on a btrfs host the pool becomes a native subvolume; elsewhere a loop file)
and dir for disposable test machines only (it provides no quotas, snapshots,
or cloning):
sudo VPSMGR_STORAGE=btrfs ./install.sh
sudo VPSMGR_STORAGE=dir ./install.sh
IPv6
IPv6 pass-through is disabled by default. Interactive installation offers three choices:
- Prefix mode: the provider routes an entire IPv6 prefix to the host
- Address-pool mode: the provider supplies separate IPv6 addresses, which an administrator adds in the admin panel
- Disabled: IPv4 only
To check IPv6 reachability before installation:
bash check-ipv6-support.sh
Usage
vps add <name> [--cpu N] [--mem NG] [--disk NG] [--bandwidth N]
vps quota <name> [--cpu N] [--mem NG] [--disk NG] [--bandwidth N]
vps list [name]
vps power <name> start|stop|restart
vps passwd <name>
vps del <name>
vps panel-url
vps admin-passwd
vps config list|set|help
The default allocation is 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM, and 10 GB of disk. CPU values may be whole cores or a fraction from 0.1 to 0.9; disk capacity can only be increased. Generated passwords are shown once.
Bandwidth quotas are monthly GiB totals for upload and download combined. Containers over quota are rate-limited to 1 Mbps in both directions without a restart.
Container swap is controlled by incus.swap_ratio (default 0.5 — a 1 GiB memory container may use up to 512 MiB of host swap). Setting the value applies it to all existing containers immediately (no restart); after upgrading to a version with swap support, run vps install to apply the swap allowance to containers created before it.
Users can define an init script in the panel. It runs as root inside the container after reinstall, with output written to /var/log/vpsmgr-init.log.
In the admin user list, clicking a username (a deliberately low-key entry point) opens a picker where the operator can assign that user a dedicated accent color, or clear it back to the default. The color themes that user's "log in" button and, during an operator impersonation session, their user-panel background (adapted for both light and dark mode) so the operator can tell users apart. Users logging in with their own password always see the default theme. Users cannot change the color themselves.
Additional Images
Debian 13 is the default image. To also offer AlmaLinux 9, openSUSE Leap 16, Arch Linux, or a Debian dev image during reinstall, build them once:
sudo bash scripts/60-rhel-image.sh # AlmaLinux 9
sudo bash scripts/70-opensuse-image.sh # openSUSE Leap 16
sudo bash scripts/80-debian-dev-image.sh # Debian 13 dev image (full dev toolchain)
sudo bash scripts/90-arch-image.sh # Arch Linux (rolling — rebuilds to the latest snapshot on every run)
The image builder is not run by install.sh, keeping the default installation small.
Configuration and Removal
The configuration file is /etc/vpsmgr/config.yaml. Prefer the validated CLI over editing it directly:
vps config list
vps config help
vps config set <key> <value>
sudo ./uninstall.sh # remove software, keep config, database, and containers
sudo ./uninstall.sh --purge # also remove config, database, containers, storage, and Incus
See the documentation index for technical details.
Screenshots
