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
Section 11.2, “Supported 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-3.12-default_20200823_amd64.tar.xz system alpine-3.13-default_20210419_amd64.tar.xz system alpine-3.14-default_20210623_amd64.tar.xz system archlinux-base_20210420-1_amd64.tar.gz system centos-7-default_20190926_amd64.tar.xz system centos-8-default_20201210_amd64.tar.xz system debian-9.0-standard_9.7-1_amd64.tar.gz system debian-10-standard_10.7-1_amd64.tar.gz system devuan-3.0-standard_3.0_amd64.tar.gz system fedora-33-default_20201115_amd64.tar.xz system fedora-34-default_20210427_amd64.tar.xz system gentoo-current-default_20200310_amd64.tar.xz system opensuse-15.2-default_20200824_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-20.04-standard_20.04-1_amd64.tar.gz system ubuntu-20.10-standard_20.10-1_amd64.tar.gz system ubuntu-21.04-standard_21.04-1_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
You can also use the Proxmox VE web interface GUI to download, list and delete container templates.
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