---
id: glance-store
version: "5.6.0"
license: unclear
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# glance-store — OpenStack Image Service Store Library

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 76.2K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Glance Store Library is the storage abstraction layer extracted from OpenStack's Glance image service. It provides a pluggable interface for reading and writing image data to different backend storage systems—local filesystem, object storage, block storage, and others—without coupling Glance or Glare to any single storage implementation.

The library is tightly integrated with the OpenStack ecosystem, depending on oslo configuration, serialization, and concurrency utilities, plus Keystone authentication. It is explicitly documented as having an unstable API and is not intended for use outside Glance and Glare; the core team does not support external adoption. It is most useful as an internal component within an OpenStack deployment or for developers contributing to Glance or Glare itself.

Use it for:

- Extend Glance image service to support a new storage backend by implementing the store driver interface.
- Integrate image storage operations into Glare artifact repository within an OpenStack cloud.
- Manage image data persistence across multiple storage backends in a Glance deployment.
- Contribute to or fork Glance/Glare and customize image storage behavior for specific infrastructure needs.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Glance Store Library provides backend storage abstraction for OpenStack's image service, enabling Glance and Glare projects to read and write image data to various storage backends.

Yes, but only if you are developing or deploying Glance or Glare within OpenStack. The library is actively maintained, has no known vulnerabilities, and carries a permissive license. However, the documentation explicitly warns that the API is unstable and unsupported outside those two projects, so do not adopt it for general-purpose image storage abstraction in other applications.

## Install

pip install glance-store
uv add glance-store
poetry add glance-store

## Installing glance-store

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel and 12 runtime dependencies from the OpenStack ecosystem. Actively maintained with a recent release.

License in practice: Licensed under Apache License 2.0 (permissive), allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install glance-store

from glance_store import driver
store = driver.get_store_from_uri('file:///var/lib/glance/images')

Requires Python 3.10 or later; intended for use within OpenStack deployments, not as a general-purpose library.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the API is stable enough for production use outside Glance/Glare despite the documented caveat about unsupported use.
- What specific storage backends are supported and how to configure them.
- Performance characteristics and scalability limits for large image repositories.

## Package facts

- License: not declared (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 76.2K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

openstack image storage backend, glance store library, image service storage abstraction, openstack image store, backend storage for glance, openstack, image-storage, backend-abstraction

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