Install incus with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• incus

Project history

Incus began in 2023 as a community fork of Canonical LXD after LXD moved away from the Linux Containers community. The Incus README says the project was adopted by Linux Containers, is maintained by the same developer team that first created LXD, and remains Apache-2.0 without a contributor license agreement.

The first Incus release was 0.1 on October 7, 2023. The release announcement described it as close to LXD 5.18 while using the fork point to remove or rename legacy interfaces, drop features tied to Canonical-specific infrastructure, switch the guest API from /dev/lxd to /dev/incus, and introduce cleaner CLI flows such as incus snapshot and incus admin.

Incus also inherited the broader Linux Containers ecosystem: LXC for system containers, image distribution through the Linux Containers infrastructure, clustering concepts from LXD, and Cowsql as the community fork of Dqlite used for replicated state.

Adoption history

Incus adoption followed a migration path from LXD: users who wanted the Linux Containers governance model could keep a familiar API and CLI shape while moving to the incus command and renamed daemon. The README emphasizes usage from a single host to a full rack-scale cluster, and Homebrew metadata in the input shows packages across Homebrew, Alpine, Fedora, Arch, Nix, MacPorts, openSUSE, Debian/Ubuntu development packages, and Windows winget.

How it is used

Users run incus to create and manage instances, images, networks, storage pools, profiles, projects, clusters, snapshots, and remotes. The tool is especially common where operators want VM-like full-system environments with container density, or a local private-cloud control plane for development labs, CI workers, and small infrastructure clusters.

Why package nerds care

Incus matters to package people because it is both a package and an ecosystem boundary marker: the package name, binary name, guest device path, config path, service name, and migration story all reflect the LXD-to-Incus governance split. It is also a good example of why package managers preserve community forks quickly when upstream ownership or distribution assumptions change.

For Homebrew specifically, incus is notable because the formula delivers the client-side tool for a Linux-first infrastructure project to macOS users, where the CLI can still manage remote Incus servers.

Timeline

• 2023: Incus repository created under the lxc GitHub organization.
• 2023: Incus 0.1 released as a community fork roughly equivalent to LXD 5.18.
• 2024: Incus 6.0 LTS established a long-term-support line.
• 2026: Incus 7.0 LTS and 7.x releases continued the post-fork release train.

Related projects

• LXD is the direct upstream lineage. LXC remains the low-level container technology in the same Linux Containers family. Cowsql is the community fork of Dqlite used by Incus for clustered database state. Zabbly provides commercial packaging support referenced by the Incus README.

Sources

• https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/incus-0-1-has-been-released/18036
• https://github.com/lxc/incus
• https://github.com/lxc/incus/releases/
• https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/docs/main/