Lima Provider for Devsy

Runs Devsy workspaces inside Lima virtual machines. Each workspace gets a dedicated Lima VM; the devcontainer is deployed by Devsy's Docker driver inside that VM, so the VM is the isolation boundary and existing devcontainer.json configurations work unchanged.

Getting started

Install Lima first (limactl must be on PATH):

brew install lima

Then add the provider:

devsy provider add devsy-org/devsy-provider-lima
devsy provider use lima

Lima is available for macOS and Linux; it does not run on Windows.

Creating your first devsy env

devsy workspace up .

The first run downloads the VM image and provisions the container runtime, so it takes a few minutes.

Container runtimes

The LIMA_RUNTIME option selects the container runtime provisioned in the VM. All three are driven by Devsy's Docker driver.

Runtime	Provisioning
docker (default)	Lima's docker-rootful template
podman	embedded Ubuntu config, rootful Podman
nerdctl	embedded Ubuntu config, system containerd

Override the template for any runtime with LIMA_TEMPLATE, for example to use a different base image or a custom Lima configuration.

Multiple workspaces on one VM

By default each workspace gets its own VM. To run multiple devcontainers on a single shared VM, enable single-machine mode:

devsy provider init lima --single-machine

Devsy then reuses one VM for all workspaces on this provider and deletes it only when the last workspace is removed.

Options

NAME	REQUIRED	DESCRIPTION	DEFAULT
LIMA_RUNTIME	false	Container runtime in the VM: docker, podman, or nerdctl.	docker
LIMA_CPUS	false	Number of CPUs to allocate to the VM.	4
LIMA_MEMORY	false	Memory in GiB to allocate to the VM.	8
LIMA_DISK	false	Disk size in GiB for the VM.	60
LIMA_VM_TYPE	false	Lima VM type (vz or qemu). Empty auto-detects (vz on Apple Silicon, qemu otherwise).
LIMA_TEMPLATE	false	Override the runtime-derived Lima template locator.
LIMA_PATH	false	Path to the limactl binary.	limactl
AGENT_PATH	false	Path where the Devsy agent is injected in the VM.	/tmp/devsy
INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT	false	Stops the VM after the given idle period, e.g. 10m or 1h.	10m
INJECT_GIT_CREDENTIALS	false	Inject git credentials into the VM.	true
INJECT_DOCKER_CREDENTIALS	false	Inject docker credentials into the VM.	true

Set options at add time or later:

devsy provider add devsy-org/devsy-provider-lima -o LIMA_CPUS=8 -o LIMA_MEMORY=16
devsy provider set lima --option LIMA_RUNTIME=podman

SELinux hosts

On SELinux-enforcing VM images (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS) the container runtime labels containers, which blocks the Devsy agent from exec-ing into them. Devsy disables the container SELinux label on enforcing hosts, so those images work without extra configuration.

Development

task build:cli            # cross-compile binaries into ./dist
task build:provider:dev   # generate ./dist/provider.yaml pointing at ./dist
task test
task lint

License

MPL-2.0