5 Setting Up and Managing Images
Throughout this chapter, you must run commands as your unprivileged user ("incusadmin" if you have followed this book from the beginning).
List available images¶
You probably can not wait to get started with a container. There are many container operating system possibilities. To get a feel for how many possibilities, enter this command:
incus image list images: | more
Enter the space bar to page through the list. This list of containers and virtual machines continues to grow.
The last thing you want to do is to look for a container image to install, particularly if you know the image you want to create. Change the command to show only Rocky Linux install options:
incus image list images: | grep rocky
This brings up a much more manageable list:
| rockylinux/8 (3 more) | dede6169bb45 | yes | Rockylinux 8 amd64 (20240903_05:18) | x86_64 | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 850.75MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/8/arm64 (1 more) | b749bad83e60 | yes | Rockylinux 8 arm64 (20240903_04:40) | aarch64 | CONTAINER | 125.51MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/8/cloud (1 more) | 4fefd464d25d | yes | Rockylinux 8 amd64 (20240903_05:18) | x86_64 | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 869.95MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/8/cloud (1 more) | 729891475172 | yes | Rockylinux 8 amd64 (20240903_05:18) | x86_64 | CONTAINER | 148.81MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/8/cloud/arm64 | 3642ec9652fc | yes | Rockylinux 8 arm64 (20240903_04:52) | aarch64 | CONTAINER | 144.84MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9 (3 more) | 9e5e4469e660 | yes | Rockylinux 9 amd64 (20240903_03:29) | x86_64 | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 728.60MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9 (3 more) | fff1706d5834 | yes | Rockylinux 9 amd64 (20240903_03:29) | x86_64 | CONTAINER | 111.25MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9/arm64 (1 more) | d3a44df90d69 | yes | Rockylinux 9 arm64 (20240903_04:49) | aarch64 | CONTAINER | 107.18MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9/cloud (1 more) | 4329a67099ba | yes | Rockylinux 9 amd64 (20240903_03:28) | x86_64 | VIRTUAL-MACHINE | 749.29MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9/cloud (1 more) | bc30d585b9f0 | yes | Rockylinux 9 amd64 (20240903_03:28) | x86_64 | CONTAINER | 127.16MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
| rockylinux/9/cloud/arm64 | 5c38ddd506bd | yes | Rockylinux 9 arm64 (20240903_04:38) | aarch64 | CONTAINER | 122.87MiB | 2024/09/02 19:00 CDT |
Installing, renaming, and listing images¶
For the first container, you are going to use "rockylinux/8". To install it, you can use:
incus launch images:rockylinux/8 rockylinux-test-8
That will create a Rocky Linux-based container named "rockylinux-test-8". You can rename a container after creating it, but you first need to stop the container, which starts automatically when created.
To start the container manually, use:
incus start rockylinux-test-8
To Rename the image (we are not going to do this here, but this is how to do it), first stop the container:
incus stop rockylinux-test-8
Use the move command to change the container's name:
incus move rockylinux-test-8 rockylinux-8
If you followed this instruction anyway, stop the container and move it back to the original name to continue to follow along.
For this guide, go ahead and install two more images for now:
incus launch images:rockylinux/9 rockylinux-test-9
and
incus launch images:ubuntu/22.04 ubuntu-test
Examine what you have by listing your images:
incus list
which will return this:
+-------------------+---------+----------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| NAME | STATE | IPV4 | IPV6 | TYPE | SNAPSHOTS |
+-------------------+---------+----------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| rockylinux-test-8 | RUNNING | 10.146.84.179 (eth0) | | CONTAINER | 0 |
+-------------------+---------+----------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| rockylinux-test-9 | RUNNING | 10.146.84.180 (eth0) | | CONTAINER | 0 |
+-------------------+---------+----------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
| ubuntu-test | RUNNING | 10.146.84.181 (eth0) | | CONTAINER | 0 |
+-------------------+---------+----------------------+------+-----------+-----------+
Author: Steven Spencer
Contributors: Ezequiel Bruni, Ganna Zhyrnova