What's new in image builder for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides two options to help you build customized RHEL images for all of your deployment needs: RHEL image builder and Red Hat Insights image builder. For an overview of both options, and a list of the latest blog posts about them, visit redhat.com/image-builder.

With the release of RHEL 10, both versions of image builder have exciting new features and improvements.

RHEL 10 image builder

The image builder feature in RHEL has a new look, and a better integrated feature experience with Insights image builder. The Insights and RHEL image builders have historically had slightly different user interfaces and feature sets, but with RHEL 10 image builder, the feature sets are almost identical. Image builder also inherits the user interface of Insights image builder, which has recently received many exciting new features that are now present in the local RHEL 10 image builder. 

New user interface

The new cockpit-image-builder package replaces the deprecated cockpit-composer package. This provides the new user interface that looks more like the Insights image builder.

Insert custom kickstart files

RHEL users have many years of experience using kickstart answer files to automate the RHEL installer. When using image builder to create customized ISO image files for installation on physical devices, there are many use cases where embedding a customized kickstart file is useful.

It's now possible to embed a custom kickstart file into the image when using the new RHEL image builder's command-line interface (CLI). This will be available in image builder's graphical user interface in a later release.

Notes:

• The kickstart option for package selection does not work by design for the type of ISO image that image builder creates. This is because image builder pre-installs the package selection into a tar archive file. The RHEL installer included in the ISO image will then perform some tasks, such as the disk partitioning defined in the kickstart file, and then extracts the tar archive of the pre-installed OS to disk using the kickstart liveimage directive.
• CLI support only today. GUI support coming in a later release.
• Currently documented in the upstream project’s documentation and will soon be included in the official documentation Composing a customized RHEL system image.

Multiple Application Streams and life cycle guidance

A key benefit to RHEL since the release of RHEL 8 is the Application Streams (AppStreams) repository, which provides multiple versions of applications. Some of these AppStreams have long life maintenance for the duration of the RHEL major release, and some have shorter life cycles. Insights image builder now presents all AppStreams options available with clear guidance on the retirement data, as well as an indication that it is from an official Red Hat repository.

Insights content helps you control the content in your builds

Insights content now provides a number of features to help you define and control the content that flows into Insights image builder as well as to running systems for patching and upgrades. Recent and new functionality is documented in Managing system content and patch updates with Red Hat Insights, and includes:

Insights Content Repositories

• custom repositories defined by publicly accessible URL
• custom repositories defined by uploaded RPM content
• Add custom repositories to content templates
• Choose snapshots by date to control defined content states, for both official Red Hat repositories as well as custom repositories
• New RHEL extensions repository

Insights Content Templates

• Templates define a collection of repositories
• Can be assigned to running systems managed by Insights
• Preview: Insights image builder can select content templates as the source content for new image builds.

Simple registration to Red Hat Satellite

Preview: Insights image builder simplifies registration of images so that they can install new software, bug fixes and security errata, and benefit from Insights analytics and management features. A preview release option to easily instruct images to register to Satellite. In the future, an option will be provided so that images can make callbacks to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Try RHEL 10 and image builder today

If this sounds good, then you should experience it for yourself! Go to Insights image builder to build your customized image of RHEL 10, and then deploy your image locally to try out your very own local build node. Check out the overview and list of latest blog posts at redhat.com/image-builder.