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Installing Debian Virtual Environments without relying on a precreated template has many advantages and a few drawbacks. This article tries to outline those factors and provide a possible solution to reduce the amount of work needed for template-less Debian deployments.
{{Note|'''[https://downloads.actiu.net/ctctl/ ctctl]''' is an alternative wizard to create a container and convert it to a template.}}
== Templates ==
[[Template|Templates]] are at the heart of the OpenVZ VE creation process. A "template cache" is basically a tarball consisting of a minimum operating system installation of a given Linux flavor.
== Reasons for pre-built templates ==
=== It's not needed after all ===
With Debian, there is no reason to actually use pre-built templates if you're not time-constrained in the deployment process and have other means of managing your configuration, since <tt>debootstrap</tt> is the tool at the core of every Debian installation and it doesn't matter if it's run by the [http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller|Debian Installer], by hand or a completely different distribution.
Since <tt>debootstrap</tt> is the tool at the core of every Debian installation it doesn't matter if it's run by the [http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller Debian Installer], during template creation, by hand or even in a completely different Linux distribution.
Management of configuration files by means of templates is a non-sustainable way of doing Configuration Management. In environments with few (if any) changes this can work out nicely, but in more agile/complex environments a proper Configuration Management solution should be used.
== Basic Steps ==
The basic steps needed to deploy Debian VEs are outlined in [[Debian template creation]].
== A working solution Creation helpers ==
To automate the process of deploying VEs with <tt>debootstrap</tt> a bit of shell-scripting glue is needed.
=== deploy.sh by Michael Renner ===
2011 version can be found at [https://github.com/terrorobe/vzstuff github.com/terrorobe/vzstuff]. To get a local copy you will need to install [http://git-scm.com/ git] and then run the following command:
git clone git://github.com/terrorobe/vzstuff.git
Following the instructions in the README file should get you started nicely.