pixie-lab 0.5.0

Bare-metal netboot appliance: catalog + fetch + NBD + PXE + TFTP + operator TUI in one container

pixie

Bare-metal netboot appliance in one container. Catalog + fetch + NBD serving + PXE plan renderer + TFTP + operator UI: one FastAPI process (plus a supervised in.tftpd subprocess for the PXE first hop), one state.db, and one admin password.

Pixie folds into a single service what bty (operator UI + machine registry + PXE plan renderer + Rich TUI), nbdmux (NBD-export multiplexer + netboot artifact serve), and a hard-fork of withcache (catalog + fetch + blob store) implement as three separate FastAPI services. bty, nbdmux, and withcache continue as their own projects; pixie is a sibling appliance that starts from a merged design. See PLAN.md for the design rationale, locked decisions, and roadmap.

Run

The reference deploy is a single podman-compose stack under --network=host. The pixie-lab CLI (installed with the package) generates the compose file, the envvars template, and a per-deploy README:

pixie-lab init /opt/pixie
"$EDITOR" /opt/pixie/envvars.example    # set PIXIE_HOST_ADDR + PIXIE_ADMIN_PASSWORD
mv /opt/pixie/envvars.example /opt/pixie/envvars
cd /opt/pixie
COMPOSE_ENV_FILES=envvars podman compose up -d

pixie-lab deploy fills in an admin password + host address + waits for /healthz in one shot, useful for a fresh lab machine.

Log in at http://:8080/. First landing after login is a dashboard summarising machines, catalog, and NBD-serving state; the top nav has Machines, Catalog, Images, Overlays, Live env, Events, and Settings.

Operator workflow

1. Point catalog import at a catalog.toml URL on /ui/catalog. Entries land staged (rows only, no bytes yet).
2. Click Fetch on a row to download it. The status pill ticks through downloading -> decompressing -> unpacking with a bytes / total counter so you see progress live.
3. For the live-env boot modes (pixie-inventory / pixie-tui / pixie-flash-*), Fetch the pixie-live-env image + its netboot bundle, then set the image's content_sha256 on the Live env page (/ui/live-env) or via PIXIE_LIVE_ENV_IMAGE_SHA. Those modes nbdboot that image; until it's selected they render unavailable.
4. Power-cycle a target with pixie in its DHCP next-server chain. A first contact shows up on /ui/machines with the default pixie-inventory boot mode (non-destructive, one-shot; it posts inventory then self-exits to ipxe-exit). Open the row to bind a mode + image.
5. pixie-inventory prompts the live env to POST an inventory blob; the target's disks + NICs + memory show up on the machine detail page.
6. Flash modes (pixie-flash-once, pixie-flash-always) require a target disk serial that came in on the inventory. The binding form disables Save until that prerequisite is met.

State

Everything writable lives under PIXIE_DATA_DIR (default /var/lib/pixie). state.db holds catalog rows, machine rows, event log, settings, NBD-export records, and persistent-overlay records. blobs/<sha>/blob holds fetched disk images. artifacts/<sha>/{vmlinuz,initrd,manifest.json} holds unpacked netboot bundles. overlays/<alias>.qcow2 holds globally-named single-writer overlay volumes for the nbdboot boot mode. The live env (pixie-inventory / pixie-tui / pixie-flash-*) is the fetched pixie-live-env disk image, selected by PIXIE_LIVE_ENV_IMAGE_SHA / the Live env page and nbdbooted like any other image, so it lives in blobs/ + artifacts/ too - there is no separate live-env directory.

Both admin password and display timezone / strftime pattern have env-var overrides plus DB overrides via /ui/settings; env wins so a compose deploy pins behaviour deterministically.

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check src tests
uv run mypy src

The integration tests spin real QEMU VMs behind a real pixie container to exercise the PXE bootstrap + ramboot chains. They are gated behind a marker so plain pytest skips them.

License

pixie is licensed under GPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE.