Getting Started

Firegopher is a toolchain for easily running Firecracker MicroVMs on a Linux host. The following guide will walk you through running your first micro VM. It assumes that you are using a more or less blank Linux host.

Prerequisites

Firegopher currently only officially supports Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish as a host operating system. This is mostly due to the fact that firegopher depends on debugfs >=1.46.5.

In general firegopher only works on linux as it uses Firecracker which uses KVM.

Installing firegopher

To install firegopher run the install script from the website.

curl -fsSL https://firegopher.dev/install | bash

Downloading assets and additional dependencies

Firegopher needs a kernel and root filesystem for its VMs and also a version of Firecracker (including Jailer) to run them. To make the installation of these dependencies easier firegopher comes with a bootstrap command that installs them.

sudo fgoph bootstrap

Run your first VM

You can download an example app.zip file to use for demo purposes

wget https://firegopher.dev/example-app.zip

To run the example application use

sudo fgoph run --app="example-app.zip" --exec="python3 app.py"

The command output should tell you the virtual IP that has been assigned to the VM.

You can try sending a request to the app by running the following command in a new terminal session:

curl http://172.19.0.2:8000

(The IP might be different depending on what IPs are still available for asignment on your host machine)