Default image server - Incus documentation
Description: The incus CLI command comes pre-configured with the following default remote image server: images:, This server provides unofficial images for a variety of Linux distributions. The images are maint...

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# Default image server

The `incus` CLI command comes pre-configured with the following default remote image server:

`images:`

  This server provides unofficial images for a variety of Linux distributions. The images are maintained by the Linux Containers team and are built to be compact and minimal.

  See `images.linuxcontainers.org` for an overview of available images.

Additional image servers can be added through `incus remote add`.

## Image server types

Incus supports the following types of remote image servers:

Simple streams servers

  Pure image servers that use the simple streams format. No special software is required to run such a server as it’s only made of static files. The default `images:` server uses simplestreams.

OCI registries

  Application container registries that server OCI images.

  The most common such registry is the `Docker Hub` that can be added with `incus remote add docker https://docker.io --protocol=oci`

Public Incus servers

  Incus servers that are used solely to serve images and do not run instances themselves.

  To make an Incus server publicly available over the network on port 8443, set the `core.https_address` configuration option to `:8443` and do not configure any authentication methods (see How to expose Incus to the network for more information). Then set the images that you want to share to `public`.

Incus servers

  Regular Incus servers that you can manage over a network, and that can also be used as image servers.

  For security reasons, you should restrict the access to the remote API and configure an authentication method to control access. See How to expose Incus to the network and Remote API authentication for more information.

## Tooling to manage a simplestreams server

Incus includes a tool called `incus-simplestreams` which can be used to manage a file system tree using the Simple streams format.

It supports importing either a container (`squashfs`) or virtual-machine (`qcow2`) image with `incus-simplestreams add`, list all images available as well as their fingerprints with `incus-simplestreams list` and remove images from the server with `incus-simplestreams remove`.

That file system tree must then be placed on a regular web server which supports HTTPS with a valid certificate.

When importing an image that doesn’t come with an Incus metadata tarball, the `incus-simplestreams generate-metadata` command can be used to generate a new basic metadata tarball from a few questions.