Terraform Provider for lima

[KhaineBOT]

Hi,

I'm thinking about using terraform to automate the creation of VMs/Containers through lima on macOS. I was wondering whether anyone was aware of an existing provider that works with lima, or the best way to use them together to customise the image before it's spun up by lima.

[afbjorklund]

Lima is currently using cloud-init and bash scripts, to do the provisioning. It is unclear where terraform (opentofu?) would be used, and what Lima would have to do? Presumably someone would write a provider, and it would call limactl to do the work.

https://opentofu.org/docs/language/providers/

[rwenz3l]

If you want to configure stuff with terraform on the mac to run VMs, you might want to use tart or qemu directly:
https://gist.github.com/gwarf/3d63b24ff86a5311da87baa7ccbb7882

With the new apple virtualization framework, one could even code the machines directly.. a new terraform provider might be able to wrap that.. (See: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10002/)

[afbjorklund]

You can use vfkit instead of qemu, if you want to use Virtualization.framework (VZ) instead of Hypervisor.framework (HVF)

It was mentioned briefly here, when comparing to the normal Lima setup: https://github.com/afbjorklund/lima-the-hard-way

It should be possible to use it with libvirt as well, but I don't know the exact syntax (or if it is supported by libvirt just yet?)

The existing libvirt "vz" driver is for Virtuozzo / Parallels, not for https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization

[guidoiaquinti]

I’ve recently published a Terraform/OpenTofu provider for Lima: https://github.com/guidoiaquinti/terraform-provider-lima

It manages local Lima virtual machines declaratively by wrapping limactl, which is close to the approach suggested earlier in this discussion. It currently supports Lima instances and disks.

The provider is still very new and pre-1.0, so the schema may evolve. That said, I’ve been successfully using it in another personal project for the past few weeks without encountering issues.

Feedback, bug reports, and contributions are very welcome.