Since Ubuntu 16.04 LXD has become a dependency in the ubuntu-server meta package. Hence both upgrade and new installation will install LXD.
This is a very annoying behavior. Is there anyway to disable this behavior? Not every production machine needs the container service to be started.
lxd is recommended by ubuntu-server
root@c7:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Release: 16.04
Codename: xenial
root@c7:~# apt-cache depends ubuntu-server|grep lxd
Recommends: lxd
root@c7:~# apt-cache depends ubuntu-server|grep Recommends
Recommends: lxd
Recommends: snapd
You can use
apt install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-server
to avoid installing lxd and snapd or
apt remove --purge lxd snapd
to remove these without removing ubuntu-server
root@c7:~# apt remove --purge lxd snapd
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
lxd* snapd*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 37.4 MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
(Reading database ... 25405 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing lxd (2.0.0-0ubuntu4) ...
Warning: Stopping lxd.service, but it can still be activated by:
lxd.socket
Purging configuration files for lxd (2.0.0-0ubuntu4) ...
Failed to stop lxd.service: Unit lxd.service not loaded.
dpkg: warning: while removing lxd, directory '/var/lib/lxd' not empty so not removed
Removing snapd (2.0.3) ...
Purging configuration files for snapd (2.0.3) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
I think you just want to disable related services, not to uninstall them. Since they are just another services, we can disable them using systemctl
sudo systemctl disable lxd
sudo systemctl disable snapd
If someday you want to start them.
sudo systemctl start lxd
sudo systemctl start snapd
Simple as is.
