alt Hacker NewsVery cool, thanks for sharing.
I built something similar recently on top of Incus via Pulumi. I also wanted to avoid libvirt's mountain of XML, and Incus is essentially a lightweight and friendlier interface to QEMU, with some nice QoL features. I'm quite happy with it, though the manifest format is not as fleshed out as what you have here.
What's nice about Pulumi is that I can use the Incus Terraform provider from a number of languages saner than HCL. I went with Python, since I also wanted to expose a unified approach to provisioning, which Pyinfra handles well. This allows me to keep the manifest simple, while having the flexibility to expose any underlying resource. I think it's a solid approach, though I still want to polish it a bit before making a public release.
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Your path makes a ton of sense too! You get typed languages, state management, and the Incus team's work on the QEMU layer. The tradeoff I wasn't willing to make is the daemon + state store: Incus wants to own the VM lifecycle the way libvirtd does, and once you have that you're back to "two sources of truth" if you ever shell out. Holos is deliberately stateless on the host; Everything lives under one directory per project, rm -rf is a valid uninstall (though it will abandon the VMs if running). Different answer to the same frustration. Would genuinely like to see your thing when it's public.
check out https://github.com/lnussbaum/incant