Building a Debian 13 (Trixie) LXC Template for Proxmox

Debian 13 (trixie) was released, but (at least as of 2025-08-12) there isn’t a LXC template available for it on proxmox. I wanted a Debian 13 LXC container, so I made a template of my own.

Install tooling

We’re going to use Debian Appliance Builder to create a Debian 13 LXC template.

First, install the tooling:

apt update
apt install -y dab wget

Download Debian 13 configuration

mkdir dab
cd dab
# Get the debian 13 dab configuration
wget -O dab.conf "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/dab.conf;hb=HEAD"
# Get a Makefile to make builds easier
wget -O Makefile "https://git.proxmox.com/?p=dab-pve-appliances.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian-13-trixie-std-64/Makefile;hb=HEAD"

Build the template

Now we can build a template.

  1. dab init
  2. dab bootstrap (or dab bootstrap --minimal to get a smaller template)
  3. dab finalize --compressor zstd-max

It’s easier to use the Makefile - run

make all

and make will run all that for you and create a zst file, debian-13-standard_13.0.20250715-1_amd64.tar.zst (as of 2025-08-12). Copy it to the proxmox cache directory, and you can now make Debian 13 LXC containers in the GUI.

mv *.zst /var/lib/vz/template/cache