lxc/incus
Powerful system container and virtual machine manager observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
94/100
- Activity 99
- Release rhythm 95
- Longevity 81
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: 27.0
- age_days: 1138
- days_rel: 34
- days_push: 8
- n_releases_24m: 31
Adoption not part of the score
6025 stars · 481 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded
Incus is a system container, application container, and virtual machine manager that provides a public-cloud-like experience for running Linux workloads, with a unified REST API and CLI. It is a community-governed fork of Canonical's LXD, maintained by the original LXD team under the Linux Containers project, scaling from a single machine to full data-center clusters.
Use cases
- run and manage linux system containers and vms on my server
- self-host a small private cloud
- find an open source alternative to lxd
- set up a home lab with containers and virtual machines
- manage a cluster of container hosts from one cli
- spin up disposable dev environments from linux distro images
- run isolated workloads with shared storage and networking
- migrate existing lxd or lxc instances to a community project
When to choose
- you want a cloud-like API and CLI to mix containers and VMs on the same storage and network
- you need built-in clustering, storage pools (ZFS, Ceph, LVM), and advanced networking (OVN, BGP) in one tool
- you prefer a fully open-source, CLA-free, community-run alternative to LXD
- you run Linux hosts and want to scale from a laptop to a data-center rack
When to avoid
- you need to build, ship, and orchestrate OCI application images across many hosts at scale - Docker or Kubernetes fit better
- your hosts are macOS or Windows, since Incus requires a Linux kernel
- you only need lightweight process isolation without image management or VM support
- you want a managed public cloud rather than self-operated infrastructure
Facets
application · maturity stable
container-runtime container-orchestration cloud self-hosted cloud-computing self-hosted cli self-hosted cloud go virtual-machines system-containers lxd-fork rest-api private-cloud image-based clustering zfs ceph ovn-networking home-lab virtualization containers devops linux
10 sources
- readme: https://github.com/lxc/incus · fetched 2026-08-28 · 9fef9d26b87f
- homepage: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus · fetched 2026-08-29 · 38f42297c90c
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main · fetched 2026-08-29 · e7ded83d765b
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus-os/docs/main · fetched 2026-08-29 · 03cf5084e71c
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/getting-started · fetched 2026-08-29 · bc8a7ac428c9
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/documentation · fetched 2026-08-29 · 12b232992f56
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/lxcfs/getting-started · fetched 2026-08-29 · da97669c7916
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/distrobuilder/docs/latest · fetched 2026-08-29 · b769c8605a16
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/tutorial/first_steps · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2d9f6baa8847
- site_page: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/explanation/containers_and_vms · fetched 2026-08-29 · c9f6211142d1
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| lxc/incus | main | 94 |
For agents
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem