Release Note

Today DigitalOcean released support for uploading custom images, enabling you to create Droplets based on your own Linux virtual machine images. Our image management API has been extended with support as well. By sending a POST to the /v2/images endpoint, you can create a new custom image. The request must contain a url attribute pointing to where the image can be downloaded. The image itself may be in the raw, qcow2, vhdx, vdi, or vmdk format. It can be compressed using gzip or bzip2 but must be smaller that 100 GB after being decompressed. For example, the body of you request might look like:

{
  "name": "ubuntu-18.04-minimal",
  "url": "http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/minimal/releases/bionic/release/ubuntu-18.04-minimal-cloudimg-amd64.img",
  "distribution": "Ubuntu",
  "region": "nyc3",
  "description": "Cloud-optimized image w/ small footprint",
  "tags": [
    "base-image",
    "prod"
  ]
}

To make organizing your images easier, we’ve also extended tagging support to custom images as well as Droplet snapshots. For additional details, see the API reference documentation for creating custom images and tagging resources.