I was introduced to the awesomeness that is Proxmox VE and got down to convering my old virtual server to Proxmox VM’s… Along the way I decided some of my VM’s didn’t need to be VM’s but that LXC containers would be just fine.  After making my second container, I got tired of running the same handful of commands (create a user account, git clone my dotfiles, install tmux, etc) so decided to investigate modifying the Ubuntu 16.04 template.  This turns out to be very easy using ‘vzdump’.

So here’s another “memo to self”.

First build a container, set it up the way you want it, then use vzdump to create a tarball of it.  Copy it to your templates directory and you’re done:

cd <container template dir>
vzdump -dumpdir . 102
gzip vzdump-lxc-102-2016_12_23-07_53_55.tar
mv vzdump-lxc-102-2016_12_23-07_53_55.tar.gz ubuntu-16.04-mpv_1604-1_amd64.tar.gz