openstack/diskimage-builder
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diskimage-builder/doc/source/user_guide/building_an_image.rst
Gregory Haynes 360033027f Create a user guide 
Our docs are very developer focused. Lets create a separate user guide
to help new users get started.

Change-Id: I8a03920e6d3306dd0405177875ea55ccb4b40fea
2015-04-01 19:51:08 +00:00

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Building An Image

Now that you have diskimage-builder properly installed <installation> you can get started by building your first disk image.

VM Image

Our first image is going to be a bootable vm image using one of the standard supported distribution elements <../elements> (Ubuntu or Fedora).

The following command will start our image build (distro must be either 'ubuntu' or 'fedora'):

disk-image-create <distro> vm

This will create a qcow2 file 'image.qcow2' which can then be booted.

Elements

It is important to note that we are passing in a list of elements <../elements> to disk-image-create in our above command. Elements are how we decide what goes into our image and what modifications will be performed.

Some elements provide a root filesystem, such as the ubuntu or fedora element in our example above, which other elements modify to create our image. At least one of these 'distro elements' must be specified when performing an image build. It's worth pointing out that there are many distro elements (you can even create your own), and even multiples for some of the distros. This is because there are often multiple ways to install a distro which are very different. For example: One distro element might use a cloud image while another uses a package installation tool to build a root filesystem for the same distro.

Other elements modify our image in some way. The 'vm' element in our example above ensures that our image has a bootloader properly installed. This is only needed for certain use cases and certain output formats and therefore it is not performed by default.