Daily VM image builds are available from the cloud team

Did you know that the cloud team generates daily images for buster, bullseye, and sid? They’re available for download from cdimage.debian.org and are published to Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure. This is done both to exercise our image generation infrastructure, and also to facilitate testing of the actual images and distribution in general. I’ve often found it convenient to have easy access to a clean, up-to-date, disposable virtual machine, and you might too.

Please note that these images are intended for testing purposes, and older ones may be removed at any time in order to free up various resources. You should not hardcode references to specific images in any tools or configuration.

If you’re downloading an image for local use, you’ll probably want one of the “nocloud” images. They have an empty root password (the security ramifications of this should be obvious, so please be careful!), and don’t rely on any cloud service for configuration. You can use the qcow2 images with QEMU on any Linux system, or retrieve the raw images for use with another VMM.

If you want to use the images on Amazon EC2, you can identify the latest nightly build using the AWS CLI as follows:

# Select the most recent bullseye image for arm64 instance types:
$ aws ec2 describe-images --owner 903794441882 \
    --region us-east-1 --output json \
    --query "Images[?Architecture=='arm64'] | [?starts_with(Name, 'debian-11-')] | max_by([], &Name)"
{
    "Architecture": "arm64",
    "CreationDate": "2020-03-04T05:31:12.000Z",
    "ImageId": "ami-056a2fe946ef98607",
    "ImageLocation": "903794441882/debian-11-arm64-daily-20200304-189",
    "ImageType": "machine",
    "Public": true,
    "OwnerId": "903794441882",
    "State": "available",
    "BlockDeviceMappings": [
        {
            "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
            "Ebs": {
                "Encrypted": false,
                "DeleteOnTermination": true,
                "SnapshotId": "snap-0d7a569b159964d87",
                "VolumeSize": 8,
                "VolumeType": "gp2"
            }
        }
    ],
    "Description": "Debian 11 (daily build 20200304-189)",
    "EnaSupport": true,
    "Hypervisor": "xen",
    "Name": "debian-11-arm64-daily-20200304-189",
    "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
    "RootDeviceType": "ebs",
    "SriovNetSupport": "simple",
    "VirtualizationType": "hvm"
}

# Similarly, select the most recent sid amd64 AMI:

$ aws ec2 describe-images --owner 903794441882 \
    --region us-east-1 --output json \
    --query "Images[?Architecture=='x86_64'] | [?starts_with(Name, 'debian-sid-')] | max_by([], &Name)"
{
    "Architecture": "x86_64",
    "CreationDate": "2020-03-04T05:13:58.000Z",
    "ImageId": "ami-00ec9272298ca9059",
    "ImageLocation": "903794441882/debian-sid-amd64-daily-20200304-189",
    "ImageType": "machine",
    "Public": true,
    "OwnerId": "903794441882",
    "State": "available",
    "BlockDeviceMappings": [
        {
            "DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
            "Ebs": {
                "Encrypted": false,
                "DeleteOnTermination": true,
                "SnapshotId": "snap-07c3fad3ff835248a",
                "VolumeSize": 8,
                "VolumeType": "gp2"
            }
        }
    ],
    "Description": "Debian sid (daily build 20200304-189)",
    "EnaSupport": true,
    "Hypervisor": "xen",
    "Name": "debian-sid-amd64-daily-20200304-189",
    "RootDeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
    "RootDeviceType": "ebs",
    "SriovNetSupport": "simple",
    "VirtualizationType": "hvm"
}

If you’re using Microsoft Azure images, you can inspect the images with az vm image list and az vm image show, as follows:

$ az vm image list -o table --publisher debian --offer debian-sid-daily --location westeurope --all | sort -k 5 | tail
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid-gen2  Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid-gen2:0.20200228.184  0.20200228.184
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid       Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid:0.20200229.185       0.20200229.185
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid-gen2  Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid-gen2:0.20200229.185  0.20200229.185
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid       Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid:0.20200301.186       0.20200301.186
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid-gen2  Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid-gen2:0.20200301.186  0.20200301.186
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid       Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid:0.20200302.187       0.20200302.187
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid-gen2  Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid-gen2:0.20200302.187  0.20200302.187
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid       Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid:0.20200303.188       0.20200303.188
debian-sid-daily  Debian       sid-gen2  Debian:debian-sid-daily:sid-gen2:0.20200303.188  0.20200303.188
Offer             Publisher    Sku       Urn                      Version

$ az vm image show --location westeurope --urn debian:debian-sid-daily:sid:latest
{
  "automaticOsUpgradeProperties": {
    "automaticOsUpgradeSupported": false
  },
  "dataDiskImages": [],
  "hyperVgeneration": "V1",
  "id": "/Subscriptions/428325bd-cc87-41f1-b0d8-8caf8bb80b6b/Providers/Microsoft.Compute/Locations/westeurope/Publishers/debian/ArtifactTypes/VMImage/Offers/debian-sid-daily/Skus/sid/Versions/0.20200303.188",
  "location": "westeurope",
  "name": "0.20200303.188",
  "osDiskImage": {
    "operatingSystem": "Linux",
    "sizeInBytes": 32212255232,
    "sizeInGb": 30
  },
  "plan": null,
  "tags": null
}

More information about cloud computing with Debian is available on the wiki.

• debian
• cloud
• aws