virt-builder and virt-builder repos

One of the most essential tools in the libguestfs package is virt-builder. Let's say that you really don't want to build a VM from scratch, either because you don't have the time or you just cannot be bothered. We will use CentOS 8 for this example, although the list of supported distributions is now roughly 50 (distributions and their sub-versions), as you can see in the following screenshot:

Figure 8.24 – virt-builder supported OSes, and CentOS distributions

In our test scenario, we need to create a CentOS 8 image as soon as possible, and create a VM out of that image. All of the ways of deploying VMs so far have been based on the idea of installing them from scratch, or cloning, or templating. These are either start-from-zero or deploy-first-template-or-template-second-provision-later types of mechanisms. What if there's another way?

virt-builder provides us with a way of doing just that...