Centralized Assets

Sometimes it is preferable to share applications, libraries, packages or even directories and files across multiple jails.

Or perhaps we just want to avoid all the time it takes to create a jail, and manually configure it with the packages we normally use.

Bastille offers a number of ways to do the above.

Templates

A template is a predefined file containing instructions to execute on a targeted jail. This is one of the easiest ways to create a repeatable environment for your Bastille jails. Simply create your template, the execute it on as many jails as you prefer.

ishmael ~ # bastille template "jail1 jail2" project/template

See Templates for more details on templates.

Mounting

On of the fastest ways to share directories and files across multiple jails is with the bastille mount command.

The following command will mount /my/host/directory into jail1 and jail2 at /my/jail/directory with read and write access. To mount with read only access, simply use ro instead of rw as the option.

ishmael ~ # bastille mount "jail1 jail2" /my/host/directory /my/jail/directory nullfs rw 0 0

Cloning

Bastille allows you to create duplicate of your jail using bastille clone. To clone your jail, use the following command.

ishmael ~ # bastille clone myjail mynewjail 10.0.0.3

This will create an exact duplicate of myjail at mynewjail.

Custom Releases

Bastille allows creating custom releases from jails, then using those releases to create more jails.

To start, we must first create our jail. Make sure it is a thick jail, as this process will not work with any other jail types.

ishmael ~ # bastille create -T myjail 14.2-RELEASE 10.0.0.1

Once the jail is up and running, configure it to your liking, then run the following commmand to create a custom release based on your jail.

ishmael ~ # bastille convert myjail myrelease

Once this process completes, you will be able to run the following command to create a jail based off your newly created release.

Please note that using this approach is experimental. It will be up to the end user to keep track of which official FreeBSD release their custom release is based on. The osrelease config variable will be set to your custom release name inside the jail.conf file.

ishmael ~ # bastille create -T --no-validate myjail myrelease 10.0.0.2