Viewing source image

Learn how to view the source image for your virtual machine (VM).

Before you begin

If you want to use the command-line examples in this guide, do the following:
1. Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
2. Set a default region and zone.
If you want to use the API examples in this guide, set up API access.

Permissions required for this task

To perform this task, you must have the following permissions:

compute.instances.get on the instance

Viewing source image

You view the source image for your VM by using either the Google Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the Compute Engine API.

In some scenarios you might see sourceDisk instead of sourceImage which means that the disk was created from another disk instead of a image, to find the source image you would need to follow the same procedure described below using the sourceDisk until the source image is found.

Console

In the Google Cloud Console, go to the VM instances page.

Go to the VM instances page
Click on the VM whose source image you want to identify. The VM instance details page displays.
From the VM instance details page, in the Boot disk section, review the Image column.

gcloud

To view the source image for your VM using gcloud command-line tool, complete the following steps:

Use the disks list command to find the zone and the name of the disks that is associated with the VM.
```
gcloud compute disks list
```
Use the disks describe command with a --format flag to filter the output.
```
gcloud compute disks describe DISK_NAME \
   --zone ZONE \
   --format='get(sourceImage)'
```
Replace the following:
- DISK_NAME: name of your disk
- ZONE: zone that the disk is located in.

API

Make a GET request to the disks.get method.

 GET https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/disks/DISK_NAME

Replace the following:

PROJECT_ID: your Project ID.
DISK_NAME: name of your disk
ZONE: zone that the disk is located in.

Your response body resembles the following snippet. The source image is returned by the sourceImage field.

{
".......
"status": "READY",
"selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/proj-12345/zones/us-east1-b/disks/test-instance",
"sourceImage": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-cloud/global/images/ubuntu-1604-xenial-v20191010",
"sourceImageId": "2313977755888824",
"type": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/proj-12345/zones/us-east1-b/diskTypes/pd-standard",
"licenses": [
  "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-1604-xenial"
],
.......
}

What's next

Learn more about images on Compute Engine.
Review the operating system details for public images on Compute Engine.