Glance is a project that defines services for discovering, registering, retrieving and storing virtual machine images. The discovery and registration responsibilities are handled by the glance-registry component while the retrieval and storage responsiblities are handled by the glance-api component.

If you'd like to run trunk, you can clone the git repo:

git clone [email protected]:openstack/glance.git

Install Glance by running:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

By default, glance-registry will use a SQLite database. If you'd like to use MySQL, or make other adjustments, you can modify the glance.cnf file (see documentation for more details).

Now that Glance is installed, you can start the service. The easiest way to do that is by using the glance-control utility which runs both the glance-api and glance-registry services:

glance-control all start

Once both services are running, you can now use the glance tool to register new images in Glance.

glance add name="My Image" < /path/to/my/image

With an image registered, you can now configure your IAAS provider to use Glance as its image service and begin spinning up instances from your newly registered images.