nixpkgs/nixos/doc/manual/installation/building-images-via-nixos-rebuild-build-image.chapter.md

# Building Images with `nixos-rebuild build-image` {#sec-image-nixos-rebuild-build-image}

Nixpkgs contains a variety of modules to build custom images for different virtualization platforms and cloud providers, such as e.g. `amazon-image.nix` and `proxmox-lxc.nix`.

While those can be imported individually, `system.build.images` provides an attribute set mapping variant names to image derivations. Available variants are defined - end extendable - in `image.modules`, an attribute set mapping variant names to a list of NixOS modules.

All of those images can be built via both, their `system.build.image` attribute, and the CLI `nixos-rebuild build-image`. To build i.e. an Amazon image from your existing NixOS configuration:

```ShellSession
$ nixos-rebuild build-image --image-variant amazon
$ ls result
nixos-image-amazon-25.05pre-git-x86_64-linux.vhd  nix-support
```

To get a list of all variants available, run `nixos-rebuild build-image` without arguments.

## Customize specific image variants {#sec-image-nixos-rebuild-build-image-customize}

The `image.modules` option can be used to set specific options per image variant, in a similar fashion as [specialisations](options.html#opt-specialisation) for generic nixos configurations.

E.g. images for the cloud provider Linode use `grub2` as a bootloader by default. If you are using `systemd-boot` on other platforms and want to disable it for Linode onlz, you could use the following options:

``` nix
  image.modules.linode = {
    boot.loader.systemd-boot.enable = lib.mkForce false;
  };
```