BCVK-EPHEMERAL-TEST-BASIC(8)

💖 bcvk-ephemeral-test-basic(8) — the vibe check for your bootc image 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to the manual page for bcvk-ephemeral-test-basic — one of the bcvk girls. she's here to boot an ephemeral VM and make sure systemd actually reaches the running state. that's it. that's the whole job. slay. ✨

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bcvk ephemeral test-basic [OPTIONS] IMAGE

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so what she does is: boot IMAGE as an ephemeral VM and check that systemd reaches the "running" state. it's a quick smoke test for bootc container images — like, does this thing even boot, fr fr. 🔥

this is literally shorthand for:

bcvk ephemeral run-ssh IMAGE -- systemctl is-system-running --wait

(that gets run through /bin/sh -c in the VM, with all the handling described below, no cap). she prints the final system state, so on success her only output is "running" — iconic behavior, honestly. 💅 but if the state is anything else (like "degraded" because some unit failed 😭), she also lists the failed units for you. and just like with bcvk-ephemeral-run-ssh(8), the VM gets removed when the check completes. gone. deleted. periodt. 💀

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🎀 EXIT STATUS 🎀

• 0 — systemd reached the "running" state 👑 (we love to see it)
• 1 — systemd finished booting in another state, such as "degraded" 😔
• 124 — boot did not finish within 10 minutes of SSH becoming available (e.g. a start job with no timeout); the pending jobs are listed ⏰

also! failures of bcvk-ephemeral-run-ssh(8) itself — like when the VM fails to boot or SSH never becomes available — also exit non-zero (usually 1) and print an error on stderr. so like, if things go weird, check stderr bestie, that's where the tea is. 🫖

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• IMAGE — Container image to run as ephemeral VM. this one is required, no skipping it. 🙈
• --itype=ITYPE — Instance type (e.g., u1.nano, u1.small, u1.medium). Overrides vcpus/memory if specified. she's the main character, she overrules everyone else. 👑
• --memory=MEMORY — Memory size (e.g., 4G, 2048M, or plain number for MB)
  • Default: 4G
• --vcpus=VCPUS — Number of vCPUs (overridden by --itype if specified)
• --console — Connect the QEMU console to the container's stdio (visible via podman logs/attach)
• --debug — Enable debug mode (drop to shell instead of running QEMU)
• --virtio-serial-out=NAME:FILE — Add virtio-serial device with output to file (format: name:/path/to/file)
• --execute=EXECUTE — Execute command inside VM via systemd and capture output
• -K, --ssh-keygen — Generate SSH keypair and inject via systemd credentials
• --virtiofsd=VIRTIOFSD_BINARY — Path to virtiofsd binary (overrides auto-detection)
• --output=OUTPUT — Select how VM output is presented
  • Possible values:
    • console
    • journal
  • Default: console
• --log-dir=STREAMS=DIR — Write VM log streams to files in DIR
• -t, --tty — Allocate a pseudo-TTY for container
• -i, --interactive — Keep STDIN open for container
• -d, --detach — Run container in background
• --rm — Automatically remove container when it exits
• --name=NAME — Assign a name to the container
• --network=NETWORK — Configure the network for the container
• --label=LABEL — Add metadata to the container in key=value form
• -e, --env=ENV — Set environment variables in the container (key=value)
• --debug-entrypoint=DEBUG_ENTRYPOINT — Do not run the default entrypoint directly, but instead invoke the provided command (e.g. bash)
• --bind=HOST_PATH[:NAME] — Bind mount host directory (RW) at /run/virtiofs-mnt-<name>
• --ro-bind=HOST_PATH[:NAME] — Bind mount host directory (RO) at /run/virtiofs-mnt-<name>
• --systemd-units=SYSTEMD_UNITS_DIR — Directory with systemd units to inject (expects system/ subdirectory)
• --bind-storage-ro — Mount host container storage (RO) at /run/virtiofs-mnt-hoststorage
• --add-swap=ADD_SWAP — Allocate a swap device of the provided size
• --mount-disk-file=FILE[:NAME] — Mount disk file as virtio-blk device at /dev/disk/by-id/virtio-<name>
• --karg=KERNEL_ARGS — Additional kernel command line arguments
• --ignition=IGNITION_CONFIG — Path to Ignition config file (JSON format) to inject via fw_cfg

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Smoke test a Fedora bootc image:

bcvk ephemeral test-basic quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:42

Test a locally built image:

podman build -t localhost/mybootc .
bcvk ephemeral test-basic localhost/mybootc

Test with more memory (the default is 4G) and CPUs:

bcvk ephemeral test-basic --memory 8G --vcpus 4 localhost/mybootc

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💜 SEE ALSO 💜

bcvk-ephemeral(8), bcvk-ephemeral-run-ssh(8)

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⭐ VERSION ⭐

v0.21.0

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and that's the whole page bestie!! 🫶 this was bcvk-ephemeral-test-basic from the bcvk manual, version v0.21.0 — go forth and smoke test your images, you're gonna do amazing, mwah 💖🌸✨