ib is a command line client for Red Hat's Image Builder. A hosted service that lets you build customized operating system images for various architectures and in various output formats.

To use ib you need an offline token which requires you to have a Red Hat Subscription. A free developer subscription gives you access.

To obtain an offline token you visit the Red Hat API Tokens page and store it in your environment under the name REDHAT_OFFLINE_TOKEN.

If you forget to do so then ib will tell you the same.

This example builds a CentOS Stream 9 QCOW image for the x86 architecture and writes it to a file called image.qcow.

€ ib c -a x86_64 -d centos-9 -t guest-image -o image.qcow
queued 968d1756-9121-47cb-8f27-3582639206aa
waiting ........................
downloading 968d1756-9121-47cb-8f27-3582639206aa

If you wish for a bit more control then the queuing, status, and downloading steps can be performed separately with the ib c q, ib c s, and ib c d commands. Check their -help for any arguments you might need.

If you want to list available distributions you use ib i d, if you want to know which architectures support which image types you can use ib i a -d centos-9.

The images you download can be customized in various ways:

Installing additional packages is done through -p argument which takes a comma-separated list of package names:

€ ib c -a x86_64 -d centos-9 -t guest-image -p nginx,tmux -o image.qcow