Cubic

Cubic spins up Linux virtual machines on Linux, macOS and Windows with a single command.

Every distribution comes as an official image and is ready to use within seconds, so you skip the long installation. Cubic keeps things simple and secure by acting as lightweight glue over proven tools. No privileged system service is required and every VM runs as your normal user. Cubic is built on top of QEMU, EDK2, official Linux distribution images and cloud-init.

The Tutorial builds your first virtual machine step by step. The How-to Guides each solve one task. The Reference lists the settings. The Explanation covers how Cubic works and why. The Commands pages list every command and its options.

Features

Fast and simple

• Creates a VM and opens a shell in one command

• Boots official Linux distribution images in seconds

• Written in Rust

Runs anywhere

• Runs on Linux, macOS and Windows hosts

• Ships Alma Linux, Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Rocky Linux and Ubuntu

• Runs amd64 and arm64 guests

• Uses the hardware accelerator of the host, KVM on Linux, Hypervisor on macOS, WHPX on Windows and NVMM on BSD

Everyday work

• Forwards ports from a VM to the host

• Copies files between host and VM and between two VMs

• Executes single commands in a VM

• Creates VM instances from reusable templates

• Snapshots a VM disk and restores it later

• Clones and renames VM instances

• Runs temporary VM instances that are deleted after use

• Isolates a VM from the network with one flag

Safe by default

• Runs every VM as a normal user process without a privileged system service

• Verifies every image against the checksum of the distribution

• Protects every VM with its own SSH key and a locked password

• Encrypts the QEMU control channels with mutual TLS

Source Code

The source code of Cubic is on Github.