Ivan - Jails

Hello Allan and Kris,

for the last week or two I've been intensively playing with FreeBSD on my
servers and decided to switch majority of them from CentOS to FreeBSD. In the
process I've decided to use FreeBSD jails as it will provide me with more dense
environment and spare me some bucks on monthly bills for the servers. As I
currently have few virtual machines at DigitalOcean I've decided to cut them
down for one big dedicated box (which may later become one big DigitalOcean VPS,
but that's not relevant for now).

Anyhow, I've started playing with FreeBSD jails and for management I've been
using ezjail utility which was at one point reviewed on this show but I've find
it to lack some of the features I'm finding myself to need, or at least I'm not
familiar how to use it to full potential.

What I basically need is to be able to create base machine template than use
that to deploy new Jails. It would be nice if additional programs within that
jail could be managed with pkg utility (binary updates all the way).

I've heard about iocage and read some tutorials on Dan's site, but when
looking into it further it seems like it isn't maintained actively anymore
instead there's another fork called iocell, should I consider switching to that?

Basically what I want to ask is what do you use for managing Jails, how are
you automating/templating those jails? Can you go a bit further into explaining
your practices for managing FreeBSD jails and provide neat tips and tricks as you
usually do?

Kind regards,
--
Ivan