Machines

Machines

A machine is a persistent Linux VM you create and keep, and shell into yourself. It is not where your containers run — each container gets its own VM, and nothing you do here changes that. If that is a surprise, read Machines and containers first; everything on this page assumes it. Machines sit under a Virtualisation heading because they are a different kind of thing from a container, not because containers live in them.

You can ignore this section entirely and use the rest of Flotilla normally.

Machines list the same way containers do: rows with a checkbox, a Sort menu, a state filter, a hover action and ⋮, with the selected machine's page beside the list: Overview · Shell · Logs · Settings · Inspect. See Views and filtering.

Which images actually boot — read this before creating one

Use alpine. The create form used to offer Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. None of them boot as a machine. Each one pulls roughly 100 MB, creates a machine record, and then dies.

The form now offers what has actually been run successfully. This is the single most useful thing on this page: a picker whose options fail is worse than no picker, because you cannot tell your mistake from the tool's.

Creating one

The defaults are 2 cores and 4 GB.

container machine create itself defaults to half the host, which on a well-specified Mac proposes something like 6 cores and 32 GB for a scratch VM. Matching the CLI sounded principled and gave bad advice, so Flotilla proposes something sensible instead. The steppers still reach the full host if you want it.

Row and menu actions

Beyond Start, Stop, Restart and Delete: Edit Settings… opens the machine's settings, Set as Default records it as container's default machine — whose own help does not say what the default affects, and which does not decide where containers run — Start and open shell does both in one step, and a Copy submenu offers Name, IP Address and Image.

The Logs tab is the same screen containers get, control for control and in the same order — Copy, Save…, Reload, Live, the options button holding Boot Log (the one you want when a machine will not come up) and Timestamps, then search. See Containers for what Live does.

Editing a running machine

You can edit a running machine's settings, and Flotilla will save them. Apply saves; Apply and Restart saves and cycles the machine so the change takes effect now.

container machine set accepts changes on a running machine and applies them at next start. Flotilla therefore says either "Saved — applies on next start" or, for a running machine, "Saved — still running on the previous values", rather than blocking you or pretending the change took effect. An earlier plan was to refuse the edit until you stopped the machine — that turned out to be a restriction the CLI does not have, and inventing one to make the UI tidier is the wrong trade.

Home-mount escalation

Mount Home Read-Write changes the home mount from read-only, which is a real widening of what containers on that machine can reach — so Flotilla confirms it.

Worth knowing if you are reading the code: machine ls does not return the home-mount value at all, so a guard that compared against it was unreachable for every machine, and the Configuration tab displayed "Read-write" for a machine the CLI reported as ro. It now reads the value from inspect and fails closed when it is absent.

Package updates

A running machine's Overview has a Package updates card. Check for Updates lists the packages that have a newer version, with the installed and available versions. It works on Alpine (apk) and AlmaLinux (dnf). Other machines say that checks are not supported.

• It only checks. Installing is up to you, in the machine's shell.
• It runs one fixed command in the machine, through the machine's own shell. It works with container 1.5.0.
• It never runs by itself. Only the button does.
• A check can start a machine that was just stopped. container runs the command by booting the machine, and nothing can stop that. The page says so.
• The machine has to be running. Start it first.

Start reporting success when it failed

container machine start does not exist. Starting is container machine run, which — with no command — needs a PTY and fails after booting the VM. So a zero exit is not proof of anything, and Flotilla verifies the machine's actual state rather than trusting the exit code.