devplayer0 / distry

Web service to test Linux distros before using them

Distry

Try a Linux distro without having to download or install anything!

What is this?

TL;DR: Spin up a VM on a remote server and access it through your browser. All resources are released once the tab is closed.

When a user requests for a new VM to be created, Distry picks from a list of configured libvirt hosts and creates a new domain (with configured resource limits). The browser is then redirected to a page with noVNC connected to the VM. A snippet of JavaScript sends a heartbeat request to the backend every few seconds to prevent the VM from being destroyed for lack of use.

The VNC connection is proxied through nginx over WS(S) (aka websockets) and therefore can be encrypted easily (since websockets are negotiated over HTTP(s)).

Deployment

To deploy Distry, you'll need a Docker (probably Docker Compose too) and a box running libvirt with SSH access.

A very simple docker-compose.yaml is provided in this repo. You'll need to create a config.yaml to configure your hypervisor(s) and distros. See the provided config.yaml.example for available options and their meanings.