capstan

README

Capstan

Capstan is a tool for rapidly building and running your application on OSv. Capstan is as simple and fast as using Docker for creating containers, but the result is a complete virtual machine image that will run on any hypervisor with OSv support.

Features

• Run multiple VMs of an image as copy-on-write
• Linux, OS X, and Windows support
• Hypervisors:
  • QEMU/KVM
  • VirtualBox
  • VMware Workstation and Fusion
• Cloud providers:
  • Google Compute Engine

Installation

You can install Capstan either by downloading pre-built binaries or building it from sources.

Prerequisites

You need to have a hypervisor such as QEMU/KVM or VirtualBox installed on your machine to launch OSv VMs.

If you want to build your own OSv images, you need QEMU installed.

On Fedora:

$ sudo yum install qemu-system-x86

On OS X:

$ brew install qemu

Installing Binaries

To install the binaries, make sure $HOME/bin is part of the PATH environment variable and then download the capstan executable and place it in $HOME/bin.

On Linux:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/bin && curl http://osv.capstan.s3.amazonaws.com/capstan/v0.1.0/linux_amd64/capstan -o $HOME/bin/capstan && chmod u+x $HOME/bin/capstan

On OS X:

$ mkdir -p $HOME/bin && curl http://osv.capstan.s3.amazonaws.com/capstan/v0.1.0/darwin_amd64/capstan -o $HOME/bin/capstan && chmod u+x $HOME/bin/capstan

Installing from Sources

You need a working Go environment installed. See Go install instructions for how to do that. Go version 1.1 or later is required.

Make sure you have the GOPATH environment variable set to point to a writable Go workspace such as $HOME/go.

To install Capstan, type:

$ go get github.com/cloudius-systems/capstan

This installs a capstan executable to your Go workspace so make sure your PATH environment variable includes $GOPATH/bin.

For more detailed information, check out installation instructions on the wiki.

Updating from Sources

To update capstan to the latest version execute the following commands:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/cloudius-systems/capstan
$ git pull
$ ./install

Usage

To run OSv on default hypervisor which is QEMU/KVM, type:

$ capstan run cloudius/osv

To run OSv on VirtualBox, type:

$ capstan run -p vbox cloudius/osv

To show a list of available remote images, type:

$ capstan search

To show a list of locally installed images, type:

$ capstan images

Documentation

• Capstanfile

Examples

• Running native Linux apps on OSv
• Running Java on OSv
• Running Clojure on OSv

License

Capstan is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license.