Welcome to KIWI NG — KIWI NG 10.3.5 documentation (original) (raw)

Your flexible operating system image and appliance builder

KIWI NG is a powerful, command-line-driven tool that allows you to create customized Linux operating system images for a variety of platforms and use cases. Whether you’re building for bare metal, virtual machines, containers, or cloud environments, KIWI provides the flexibility and control you need to craft the perfect OS image.

Note

This documentation covers KIWI Next Generation (KIWI NG) 10.3.5.

Why KIWI?

• Versatile Image Types: Build everything from traditional ISOs and virtual machine images (VMware, KVM, Hyper-V) to container images (Docker, OCI), live systems for USB sticks, and images for cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Declarative by Design: Define your entire image using a simple set of human-readable XML files. This allows for easy versioning, sharing, and reproducibility.
• Cross-Distribution Support: While born in the SUSE world, KIWI NG supports a wide range of Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu.
• Extensible and Customizable: A flexible plugin architecture and the ability to include custom scripts and configuration files give you full control over the image-building process.
• Battle-Tested: KIWI NG is used by enterprises and open-source projects alike, and builds official images in the build service of SUSE and Fedora.

Get Started

Ready to build your first image? Jump into the Quick Start or explore the Concept and Workflow to get a deeper understanding of how KIWI NG works.

System Requirements

To use and run KIWI NG, you need:

• A recent Linux distribution, see Build Host Constraints for details.
• Enough free disk space to build and store the image. We recommend a minimum of 15GB.
• Python version 3.9 or higher
• Git (package git) to clone a repository.
• Optionally a virtualization technology to start the image or isolate the build. We recommend QEMU.

The project officially tests and supports the following distributions:

Contact

• Mailing list
  The kiwi-images group is an open group, and anyone cansubscribe, even if you do not have a Google account.
• Matrix
  An open network for secure, decentralized communication. Please find the#kiwi:matrix.org room viaMatrix on the web or by using the supportedclients.