486f3c01eb
A blurb on output formats is useful for our users. Change-Id: Iffa5036a84c1500ccb38cd3edb258ddbf5148a3e
57 lines
1.9 KiB
ReStructuredText
57 lines
1.9 KiB
ReStructuredText
Building An Image
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=================
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Now that you have diskimage-builder properly :doc:`installed <installation>`
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you can get started by building your first disk image.
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VM Image
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--------
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Our first image is going to be a bootable vm image using one of the standard
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supported distribution :doc:`elements <../elements>` (Ubuntu or Fedora).
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The following command will start our image build (distro must be either
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'ubuntu' or 'fedora'):
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::
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disk-image-create <distro> vm
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This will create a qcow2 file 'image.qcow2' which can then be booted.
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Elements
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--------
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It is important to note that we are passing in a list of
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:doc:`elements <../elements>` to disk-image-create in our above command. Elements
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are how we decide what goes into our image and what modifications will be
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performed.
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Some elements provide a root filesystem, such as the ubuntu or fedora element
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in our example above, which other elements modify to create our image. At least
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one of these 'distro elements' must be specified when performing an image
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build. It's worth pointing out that there are many distro elements (you can even
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create your own), and even multiples for some of the distros. This is because
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there are often multiple ways to install a distro which are very different.
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For example: One distro element might use a cloud image while another uses
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a package installation tool to build a root filesystem for the same distro.
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Other elements modify our image in some way. The 'vm' element in our example
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above ensures that our image has a bootloader properly installed. This is only
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needed for certain use cases and certain output formats and therefore it is
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not performed by default.
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Output Formats
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--------------
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By default a qcow2 image is created by the disk-image-create command. Other
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output formats may be specified using the `-t <format>` argument. Multiple
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output formats can also be specified by comma separation. The supported output
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formats are:
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* qcow2
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* tar
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* vhd
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* docker
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* raw
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