Serve daemon-managed .vm names directly from bangerd on 127.0.0.1:42069 instead of shelling out to mapdns. This keeps DNS state tied to VM lifecycle and lets the daemon rebuild records from running VMs after startup or reconcile.
Add a small in-process authoritative DNS server, register and remove records from the VM start/stop/delete paths, and show the listener in daemon status. Remove the mapdns config and preflight surface, stop helper-flow DNS publishing in customize.sh and interactive.sh, drop dns.sh from the runtime bundle, and update docs/tests for the new local-resolver integration model.
Validated with GOCACHE=/tmp/banger-gocache go test ./..., GOCACHE=/tmp/banger-gocache make build, and bash -n customize.sh interactive.sh.
Remove the last shell-owned NAT surface by extracting the iptables logic into a shared Go package and using it from both bangerd and a hidden helper bridge in the CLI.
Route customize.sh and interactive.sh through banger internal nat up/down so the remaining shell helpers reuse the same rule logic, resolve the local banger binary explicitly, and tear NAT back down during cleanup.
Drop nat.sh from the runtime bundle and docs now that NAT is Go-managed everywhere, and keep coverage aligned with the new shared package and helper command.
Validation: go test ./..., bash -n customize.sh interactive.sh verify.sh, make build, and a live ./verify.sh --nat run that installed host rules, reached outbound network access, and cleaned them up successfully.
Make the Firecracker and bangerd processes outlive short-lived CLI request contexts so vm create no longer kills the VMM or daemon as soon as the RPC returns.
Fix fresh-VM SSH by flattening the seeded /root work disk when the copied home tree lands under a nested root/ directory, and write a guest sshd override to keep root pubkey auth explicit while debugging.
Harden teardown and smoke diagnostics: verify.sh now reports early Firecracker exit and delete failures directly, while dm snapshot cleanup tolerates already-gone handles and retries busy mapper removal long enough for Firecracker to release the device.
Validation: go test ./..., make build, bash -n verify.sh, direct SSH against a fresh VM, and a live ./verify.sh run that now completes with [verify] ok.
VM create and vm set accepted zero or negative CPU and memory values, which either got stored directly or silently fell back to defaults and only surfaced as failures later. This tightens validation so bad settings are rejected at the user boundary and again in the daemon before any VM record is persisted.
Change vm.create CPU and memory request fields to optional pointers so omitted values still mean defaults, while explicit non-positive values can be distinguished and rejected. Update Cobra create/set parsing, keep the TUI aligned with the new API shape, and add regression tests for CLI parsing, daemon-side validation, and the create-defaults path.
Validation: go test ./... and make build. Left my-rootfs.ext4 untracked.
VM start, image build, and network/setup failures were hard to diagnose because bangerd emitted almost no lifecycle logs and the Firecracker SDK logger was discarded. This adds a daemon-wide JSON logger with configurable log level so failures leave breadcrumbs instead of only side effects.
Log the main daemon and VM lifecycle stages, preserve raw Firecracker and image-build helper output in dedicated files, and include those log paths in daemon status and returned errors. Bridge SDK logrus output into the daemon logger at debug level so low-level Firecracker diagnostics are available without making normal info logs unreadable.
Validation: go test ./... and make build. Left unrelated worktree changes out of this commit, including internal/api/types.go, the deleted shell scripts, and my-rootfs.ext4.
Stop assuming one workstation layout for runtime artifacts, mapdns, and host tooling. The daemon and shell helpers now use portable mapdns configuration, and runtime bundles can carry bundle.json metadata for their default kernel, initrd, modules, rootfs, and helper paths.
Load bundle metadata through config with a legacy layout fallback, thread mapdns_bin/mapdns_data_file through the Go and shell paths, and add command-scoped preflight checks for VM start, NAT, image build, work-disk resize, and SSH so missing tools or artifacts fail with actionable errors.
Update the runtime-bundle manifest, docs, and tests to match the new model. Verified with go test ./..., make build, and bash -n customize.sh interactive.sh dns.sh make-rootfs.sh verify.sh.
Fix the misleading make install path where banger and bangerd still depended on a repo checkout for Firecracker, guest artifacts, image builds, and the SSH key.
Replace repo-root inference with an explicit runtime bundle model: resolve a runtime_dir from env/config/install layout, derive concrete artifact paths from it, and update the daemon, CLI, and image-build flow to use those paths. Keep repo_root only as an explicit compatibility alias instead of auto-detecting it.
Teach customize.sh to run from a read-only bundled runtime tree while writing transient state under XDG/BANGER_STATE_DIR, and make make install copy the runtime assets into PREFIX/lib/banger so installed binaries stay usable outside the repo.
Validate with go test ./..., make build, bash -n customize.sh, and make install DESTDIR=/tmp/banger-install PREFIX=/usr. An out-of-repo installed-binary smoke test was attempted, but this sandbox blocked bangerd from binding its Unix socket (setsockopt: operation not permitted).
Replace the shell-only user workflow with `banger` and `bangerd`: Cobra commands, XDG/SQLite-backed state, managed VM and image lifecycle, and a Bubble Tea TUI for browsing and operating VMs.\n\nKeep Firecracker orchestration behind the daemon so VM specs become persistent objects, and add repo entrypoints for building, installing, and documenting the new flow while still delegating rootfs customization to the existing shell tooling.\n\nHarden the control plane around real usage by reclaiming Firecracker API sockets for the user, restarting stale daemons after rebuilds, and returning the correct `vm.create` payload so the CLI and TUI creation flow work reliably.\n\nValidation: `go test ./...`, `make build`, and a host-side smoke test with `./banger vm create --name codex-smoke`.
