Cloud Images and CLIs: glance

To interact with Cloud Images at the command line, you can use tools created specifically for the purpose of interacting with OpenStack based clouds (nova and glance) or general-purpose tools (cURL).

Note

Rackspace CLI does not currently support Cloud Images. Support for Cloud Images will be added as development for Rackspace CLI continues.

Because Cloud Servers and Cloud Images work so closely together, the command-line tools that work well with Cloud Servers also work well with Cloud Images.

You can read about these as a group at Cloud Servers and CLIs: rack, nova, and supernova or you can go directly to the tool that interests you:

• nova CLI

• supernova CLI

• cURL CLI

If you choose to use tools created specifically for interacting with Openstack based clouds, use glance CLI, focused on Cloud Images.

In working with Cloud Images, you might find that you need to use nova for some functions and glance for others. You should install them both. You can see an example of using nova and glance together at OpenStack CLI Basics where, in the “Creating a Modified Image” section, glance image-create establishes a new image and nova boot initializes a new server from that image.

Before you can use one of these tools, you must install a local (client) copy. The installation procedure varies for each tool and is documented with the tool.

The commands that you can send are the the same as the requests you can send to the API endpoint, but they are wrapped in the syntax of the client. The Cloud Images API Reference lists those requests for Cloud Images.

The Getting Started Guide for the Cloud Images API includes many examples of using cURL commands to send requests to the API’s endpoint, especially at Using images.

The Developers Guide for the Cloud Images API also demonstrates using cURL to interact with the API, such as at How cURL commands work.