Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

45 ccheshirecat 2 9/7/2025, 2:30:16 AM github.com ↗

hey guys. the other day i was migrating hosting providers and i just needed something not too heavy and convenient to spin up my backups for awhile and realised there is almost nothing out there. kimchi hasn't been updated for years and cockpit is heavy. so here's something i came up with in a couple hours because of a sudden urge, nothing fancy just basic creation with cloud init, lifecycle management and image/storage, but it's modern-ish and it compiles to a 8.4mb binary inclusive of the embedded web UI, CLI and API, and only dep is libvirt.

Comments (2)

k_bx · 2h ago

While I am using cockpit every time I need to remotely manage the machines, I couldn't get it to log me in via something other than user's login/password, which are not that safe, and it listens to 0.0.0.0 by default too.

So I have to ssh into machine, start cockpit service, use it, and then stop the cockpit.socket once I finish.

Would be great to have something which has its own users/passwords (to have strong password in bitwarden) and doesn't listen to 0.0.0.0 by default. If it's also lightweight – even better!

0x073 · 38m ago

I thought cockpit use pam, so you can use other pam modules to log in.

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Show HN: Lightweight tool for managing Linux virtual machines

Comments (2)