How to set up a chroot environment for testing
Recently I have suffered a total system destruction in one of my computers. It happened while I was testing a software that I am developing, due to a simple bug. It helped me realize my lack of caution while testing unstable things, and I learned that it is always better to do the testing inside a chroot environment. Chroot’s provide isolation from the rest of the operating system, so that in case of severe errors damage can be mitigated.
Here are the steps that I took for installing a chroot environment for testing.
- Install the packages debootstrap and dchroot:
sudo apt-get install debootstrap dchroot
- Add these line to /etc/schroot/schroot.conf:
[precise] description=Ubuntu Precise LTS location=/var/chroot/btranslator priority=3 users=ubuntu groups=sbuild root-groups=root
- Bootstrap the chroot with a minimal Ubuntu installation:
debootstrap --variant=minbase --arch=amd64 precise \ /var/chroot/btranslator http://mirror.rackspace.com/ubuntu/ cp /etc/resolv.conf /var/chroot/btranslator/etc/resolv.conf cp /etc/apt/sources.list /var/chroot/btranslator/etc/apt/ mount -o bind /proc /var/chroot/btranslator/proc chroot /var/chroot/btranslator/ apt-get install ubuntu-minimal apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install language-pack-en-base apt-get install vim aptitude - Install LAMP:
apt-get install aptitude tasksel tasksel install lamp-server
- Make a startup script /etc/init.d/chroot-btranslator with a content
like this:
CHROOT=/var/chroot/btranslator case "$1" in start) service apache2 stop service mysql stop mount -o bind /proc $CHROOT/proc mount -o bind /dev $CHROOT/dev mount -o bind /sys $CHROOT/sys mount -o bind /dev/pts $CHROOT/dev/pts chroot $CHROOT/ service mysql start chroot $CHROOT/ service apache2 start ;; stop) chroot $CHROOT/ service apache2 stop chroot $CHROOT/ service mysql stop umount $CHROOT/dev/pts umount $CHROOT/sys umount $CHROOT/dev umount $CHROOT/proc service mysql start service apache2 start ;; esac - Make it executable and start it at boot:
chmod +x /etc/init.d/chroot-btranslator update-rc.d chroot-btranslator defaults service chroot-btranslator start
Referencies: