Virt-Lightning 2.5.0

I just published Virt-Lightning 2.5.0. The tool aims to give Linux users a way to quickly spawn cloud images locally. The user interface is a CLI and its philosophy is inspired by similar tools like the OpenStack CLI, ec2 command, Podman or Docker.

For instance, if you want to run the latest snapshot of Fedora 43, you can just install uv and run:

uvx virt-lightning start fedora-43 --memory 2048

What's new in 2.5.0

This release brings several improvements to image management:

• Renamed commands: fetch is now pull, distro_list is now images, and remote_images list all the images ready to be downloaded. Overall, this gives a more intuitive CLI experience.
• Pull images from any URL: You can now create new local image (distro) directly from an image URL.
• Cloud-init user data: Exposed the packages and write_files configuration options for more flexible VM customization.

Here are some examples:

List available images:

uvx virt-lightning images

Pull an image from a custom URL:

uvx virt-lightning pull --url https://example.com/my-image.qcow2 my-custom-image

Start a VM with additional packages:

uvx virt-lightning start fedora-43 --packages vim,htop

Thanks to Jim McCann for his code contribution.