Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> I have nice idea. What about "week of templates" for OpenVZ? I really
> want to setup my own server for building Debian-8 templates. But
> there are no docs.
> 
> Actually we have HUGE experience with PCS templates system and could
> share this experience.
> 
> But we need help from OpenVZ folks with some information "how you are
> building templates for OpenVZ". Then we could offer good docs :)

The place to start is:

http://wiki.openvz.org/Category:Templates

You may have already looked through some of that... but yeah... most all of 
that was contributed by community folks... and the bulk of it is outdated and 
not well maintained.  That is mostly the fault of the community.  The 
instructions for contributing an OS Template say to create a forum thread with 
details on how it was done... but no one has really followed those 
documentation instructions for a while now... and I'm guilty of that myself.

The gist of it is that you can use a distro's regular package management tools 
to install a base / minimal system in a separate directory... and once done... 
just tar.gz|xz it up.  The official OS Templates from the OpenVZ Project tend 
to add a few vz-sourced stub packages to replace some bulky and/or unneeded 
packages (like a kernel package for example) but those really are not required. 
 Feel free to take a look at an example of my contributed Fedora OS Templates.

http://download.openvz.org/template/precreated/contrib/fedora-21-x86_64-20150323.tar.xz

In particular, notice the two files I've included within it to generate the 
regular and minimal flavors:

/root/create-fedora21-ostemplate.sh
/root/create-fedora21minimal-ostemplate.sh

Basically whenever I want to update my contributed OS Templates, I just create 
a container from the current OS Template and then run those scripts within... 
as they basically just download the latest packages for everything, install 
them in a temporary directory, make a few minor changes to the install tree... 
and then tar.xz it up.

I did make an attempt to build a Debian 8 OS Template because someone requested 
one in IRC prior to the release of the beta and later official OS Template by 
the OpenVZ Project.  Unfortunately I didn't include the little build script I 
cooked up for that within it like I do with the Fedora ones... and that was an 
oversight on my part.  It was basically the same thing though only substituting 
the apt-get commands for the yum/dnf ones.  I'd love to be more helpful... but 
I'm not that advanced of a Debian user. :(

Hopefully that's enough to get you started.

How does the newer vztt OS Template build system do what it does?  I don't know 
yet... but I'm guessing there is no magic... that it uses the native packaging 
tools... downloads a minimal set of packages from a distro's official repos... 
extracts them to a temporary directory... does some rudimentary clean up and 
optimization (turning off undesired / unworking-in-a-container services, 
etc)... and then just tar.gz's it up.  It probably put some effort into 
abstracting how to specify repo URLs and package lists... but other than 
that... that fancy stuff is just icing.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]
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