puter start [options] name
Start a new VM with the given name. If this is the first run,
puter pulls an OCI base image, creates a qcow2 overlay, requests a TAP
device from the daemon, launches cloud-hypervisor, and configures the guest
via the guest agent.
VM names are limited to 12 characters.
- --cpus
count
- Number of virtual CPUs. Default: 1.
- --memory
size
- Memory size (e.g., "512M", "2G"). Default:
"512M".
- --image
ref
- OCI image reference to use as the base image. If not specified, the
default puter base image is used.
- --ssh-key
key
- SSH public key to inject into the VM. Can be specified multiple times to
add several keys.
- --no-ssh-key
- Do not inject any SSH keys into the VM.
- --node
name
- Target cluster node to start the VM on. Requires a running cluster.
- --volume
name:/path
- Mount a volume into the VM at the given path. Can be specified multiple
times. Uses virtio-fs.
- --disk-size
size
- Size of the root disk (e.g., "4G", "10G").
- --serial-log
path
- Log serial console output to the specified file.
- --user
name
- SSH user for the VM. If not specified, puter auto-detects from the OCI
image's USER directive. Falls back to "root" when the image has
no USER set.
Boot a VM with default settings:
$ puter start myvm
Boot with 2 CPUs and 2GB memory:
$ puter start --cpus 2 --memory 2G myvm
Boot with an SSH key and a mounted volume:
$ puter start --ssh-key ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub --volume data:/mnt/data myvm
Boot on a specific cluster node:
$ puter start --node worker1 myvm