Custom Playgrounds

iximiuz Labs supports creating custom playgrounds by:

• Reconfiguring a base playground and/or modifying its filesystem with user-defined init scripts
• Creating a completely new rootfs image (either from scratch or based on an existing image)
• Saving a running playground with all its rootfs modifications as a new custom playground

iximiuz Labs Playgrounds: multi-network, multi-VM, multi-disk setups with a rich collection of base rootfs images and the ability to bring your own rootfs.

To get started, navigate to the /new/playground page and follow the wizard instructions. For more advanced use cases, you can use the labctl CLI tool to create and manage custom playgrounds using Kubernetes-style YAML manifests:

• labctl playground create - create a new custom playground
• labctl playground manifest - to view the YAML manifest of a custom playground
• labctl playground update - to update a custom playground from a YAML manifest

Additional Resources

• 🎬 Playgrounds 2.0 - Revamped Constructor UI
• 🎬 Simplified Linux Playground Constructor

It's possible to create a playground with a custom root filesystem, and there are various reasons you might want to do this:

• You want something that's not available from one of the existing base images.
• You want to add additional dependencies on top of one of those existing base images.
• You have a custom playground that's based on an existing base image but it installs a bunch of things and the init tasks make the user wait a long time before the playground is ready.

Depending on which approach you want to take, the process is some variant of the following:

• Create a Dockerfile locally that has all the things you want in it
• Test that it builds okay
• Push the built image to a container registry (preferably ghcr.io; note that Docker Hub is not supported due to its strict rate limiting)
• Use that image as the drive for a custom playground via a manifest.yaml file and push via labctl.

kind: playground
name: <playground-name>
playground:
  machines:
    - name: <machine-name>    
      drives:
        - source: oci://ghcr.io/lpmi-13/amazing-demo-image:v1
          mount: /
          size: 30GiB

• Use that image as the drive for a custom playground via the web UI

Setting a custom OCI image as a VM drive rootfs source using the Playground Constructor UI.

Additional Resources

• Writeup of one experience doing this