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Creating a customized RHEL 10 VM image with image-builder

April 10, 2026 Updated Apr 13, 2026 - Toni Schmidbauer - 3 min read (609 words)

In the blog post Creating a RHEL 10 VM on macOS with bootc-image-builder we described how to quickly create a bootc (image mode) base image on macOS. Now we would like to create a customized standard RHEL image.

For this exercise we re-use an already provisioned RHEL 10.1 machine, the reasons for this are

We are going to use the image-builder command instead of bootc image builder. If there is a container image providing this command, please let us know
We are going to install packages which requires a subscribed RHEL machine. A RHEL subscription for up to 16 machines is free of charge. You just need to register at the Red Hat developer site.

First we need to install required tools onto our RHEL 10.1 host:

$ sudo dnf install -y image-builder

Next we create a blueprint file to customize the resulting qcow2 image. We use the resulting image for a "services" machine, running Unifi OS, Kea for DHCP and ISC bind (dns server):

name = "services-rhel10"
description = "A VM running services"
version = "0.1"

[[packages]]
name = "podman"
version = "*" (1)

[customizations]
hostname = "services"

[[customizations.filesystem]]
mountpoint = "/"
minsize = "50 GiB" (2)

[customizations.kernel]
append = "ip=10.0.0.144::10.0.0.1:255.255.255.0:services:ens3:none:10.0.0.255" (3)

[[customizations.group]]
name = "pinhead"
gid = 1000

[[customizations.user]]
name = "pinhead"
password = "<password hash>" (4)
key = "<ssh public key>" (5)
home = "/home/pinhead/"
shell = "/usr/bin/bash"
groups = ["users", "wheel"]
uid = 1000
gid = 1000

[[customizations.sshkey]]
user = "root"
key = "<public key>" (6)

1	use the latest version of this package
2	resize the resulting image to 50GB
3	we configure a static ip address for this machine, our default interface is ens3
4	Enter the generated password hash here (see below)
5	SSH public key to access this account
6	SSH public key to access the root account

To create a password hash use:

python3 -c 'import crypt,getpass;pw=getpass.getpass();print(crypt.crypt(pw) if (pw==getpass.getpass("Confirm: ")) else exit())'

For a detailed list of all customizations supported by image-builder see the image builder customizations documentation.

As mentioned in the previous article image builder provides the option to configure the resulting image via kickstart. A builder for kickstart files is available here:

https://access.redhat.com/labs/kickstartconfig/

For a complete list of options see the kickstart documentation.

One important note from the documentation (quoted):

The following combined customizations are not supported: [customizations.user] and [customizations.installer.kickstart]. When you add a Kickstart, use a configuration file in the TOML format, because multi-line strings are prone to error.

Now we are ready to run image-builder:

image-builder build qcow2 --distro rhel-10.1 --arch x86_64 --blueprint services-blueprint.toml

The command above failed for us with the following error message:

Failed to open file "/sys/fs/selinux/checkreqprot": Read-only file system
imported gpg key
Signature check failed on sha256:9d0a71d87912a815f837f8427438936d6e9842834cc1f1062b90b2a41fbde594, lookup package name in manifest.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/run/osbuild/bin/org.osbuild.rpm", line 260, in <module>
r = main(args["tree"], args["inputs"], args["options"])
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/run/osbuild/bin/org.osbuild.rpm", line 162, in main
subprocess.run([
  File "/usr/lib64/python3.12/subprocess.py", line 571, in run
raise CalledProcessError(retcode, process.args,
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['rpmkeys', '--root', '/run/osbuild/tree', '--checksig', 'sha256:9d0a71d87912a815f837f8427438936d6e9842834cc1f1062b90b2a41fbde594']' returned non-zero exit status 1.
Finished module org.osbuild.rpm
Finished pipeline build
manifest - failed
Output:
Failed

According to this knowledge base article this is a bug in the current (2026-04-10) version of image builder.

You can download an updated JSON file containing the missing RPM GPG keys from the article. Drop the RHEL-10.1 JSON file in a directory and run image-builder again:

image-builder --data-dir override/ <1> build qcow2 --distro rhel-10.1 --arch x86_64 --blueprint services-blueprint.toml

1	Use the --data-dir option and specify the folder with the RHEL-10.1.json file.

You can find the resulting qcow image in the output directory under rhel-10.1-qcow2-x86_64/rhel-10.1-qcow2-x86_64.qcow2.

A Makefile to streamline image creation can be found here.

Creating a customized RHEL 10 VM image with image-builder

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