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6.7. Templates
Creating a container generally involves creating a root filesystem for the container. lxc-create delegates this work to templates, which are generally per-distribution. The lxc templates shipped with lxc can be found under /usr/share/lxc/templates, and include templates to create Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Oracle, centos, and gentoo containers among others.
Creating distribution images in most cases requires the ability to create device nodes, often requires tools which are not available in other distributions, and usually is quite time-consuming. Therefore lxc comes with a special download template, which downloads pre-built container images from a central lxc server. The most important use case is to allow simple creation of unprivileged containers by non-root users, who could not for instance easily run the debootstrap command.
When running lxc-create, all options which come after -- are passed to the template. In the following command, --name, --template and --bdev are passed to lxc-create, while --release is passed to the template:
lxc-create --template ubuntu --name c1 --bdev loop -- --release bionic
You can obtain help for the options supported by any particular container by passing --help and the template name to lxc-create. For instance, for help with the download template,
lxc-create --template download --help