quick-start.md

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• bcvk installed (see Installation Guide)
• podman
• QEMU/KVM
• A bootc container image

Your First VM

bcvk ephemeral run-ssh quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42

This starts a VM and automatically SSHs into it. The VM terminates when you exit the SSH session.

Ephemeral VMs

# Start a background VM with auto-cleanup
bcvk ephemeral run -d --rm -K --name mytestvm quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42

# SSH into it
bcvk ephemeral ssh mytestvm

Creating Disk Images

# Raw disk image
bcvk to-disk quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream10 /path/to/disk.img

# qcow2 format
bcvk to-disk --format qcow2 quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42 /path/to/fedora.qcow2

# Custom size
bcvk to-disk --size 20G quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42 /path/to/large-disk.img

Persistent VMs with libvirt

# Create and start
bcvk libvirt run --name my-server quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42

# Manage lifecycle
bcvk libvirt ssh my-server
bcvk libvirt stop my-server
bcvk libvirt start my-server
bcvk libvirt list
bcvk libvirt rm my-server

Image Management

# List bootc images
bcvk images list

Resource Configuration

# Ephemeral VM
bcvk ephemeral run --memory 4096 --cpus 4 --name bigvm quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42

# libvirt VM
bcvk libvirt run --name webserver --memory 8192 --cpus 8 --disk-size 50G quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream10