Container Images

Container Images

Container images, sometimes also referred to as “templates” or “appliances”, are tar archives which contain everything to run a container.

Proxmox VE itself provides a variety of basic templates for the most common Linux distributions. They can be downloaded using the GUI or the pveam (short for Proxmox VE Appliance Manager) command line utility. Additionally, TurnKey Linux container templates are also available to download.

The list of available templates is updated daily through the pve-daily-update timer. You can also trigger an update manually by executing:

# pveam update

To view the list of available images run:

# pveam available

You can restrict this large list by specifying the section you are interested in, for example basic system images:

List available system images

# pveam available --section system
system          alpine-3.10-default_20190626_amd64.tar.xz
system          alpine-3.9-default_20190224_amd64.tar.xz
system          archlinux-base_20190924-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          centos-6-default_20191016_amd64.tar.xz
system          centos-7-default_20190926_amd64.tar.xz
system          centos-8-default_20191016_amd64.tar.xz
system          debian-10.0-standard_10.0-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          debian-8.0-standard_8.11-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          debian-9.0-standard_9.7-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          fedora-30-default_20190718_amd64.tar.xz
system          fedora-31-default_20191029_amd64.tar.xz
system          gentoo-current-default_20190718_amd64.tar.xz
system          opensuse-15.0-default_20180907_amd64.tar.xz
system          opensuse-15.1-default_20190719_amd64.tar.xz
system          ubuntu-16.04-standard_16.04.5-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          ubuntu-18.04-standard_18.04.1-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          ubuntu-19.04-standard_19.04-1_amd64.tar.gz
system          ubuntu-19.10-standard_19.10-1_amd64.tar.gz

Before you can use such a template, you need to download them into one of your storages. If you’re unsure to which one, you can simply use the local named storage for that purpose. For clustered installations, it is preferred to use a shared storage so that all nodes can access those images.

# pveam download local debian-10.0-standard_10.0-1_amd64.tar.gz

You are now ready to create containers using that image, and you can list all downloaded images on storage local with:

# pveam list local
local:vztmpl/debian-10.0-standard_10.0-1_amd64.tar.gz  219.95MB

pct uses them to create a new container, for example:

# pct create 999 local:vztmpl/debian-10.0-standard_10.0-1_amd64.tar.gz

The above command shows you the full Proxmox VE volume identifiers. They include the storage name, and most other Proxmox VE commands can use them. For example you can delete that image later with:

# pveam remove local:vztmpl/debian-10.0-standard_10.0-1_amd64.tar.gz