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How to use cURL to Clone a Droplet from a Snapshot

Posted on August 30, 2014

I’m trying to create a 2nd Droplet.

When wanting just the OS software installed, through Digital Ocean’s control panel I can Select Image > Linux Distributions tab > and select a Linux OS image, to which another Droplet will be spun. Similarly, when using a cURL statement such as …

curl -s “https://api.digitalocean.com/droplets/new/?name=server2&size_id=66&image_id=XXXXXX&region_id=4&client_id=YYYYYY&api_key=ZZZZZZ

… a message is given …

{“status”:“OK”,“droplet”:{“id”:AAAAAA,“name”:“server2”,“image_id”:XXXXXX,“size_id”:66,“event_id”:BBBBBB}}

… and a 2nd Droplet is spun with, again, just the OS software installed.

Furtherer, if wanting to spin a 2nd Droplet as a clone of my 1st server, which already has LAMP and my web pages installed on it; through Digital Ocean’s control panel I can Select Image > My Images tab > and select a snapshot name, to which a new Droplet is spun with all the software included.

At this point I’m not sure how to use a cURL statement, to clone via a Snapshot.

Any answer or direction is appreciated.



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To launch a new droplet based on a snapshot, you’d use the same API call:

curl -s "https://api.digitalocean.com/droplets/new/?name=server2&sizeid=66&imageid=XXXXXX&regionid=4&clientid=YYYYYY&api_key=ZZZZZZ"

You just need to replace the imageid with the ID for your snapshot. To find your image ID, run:

curl -s "https://api.digitalocean.com/v1/images/?clientid=YYYYYY&api_key=ZZZZZZ"

I’d also suggest installing the jq command. You can pipe the results to it so that they are printed out nicely:

curl -s "https://api.digitalocean.com/v1/images/?clientid=YYYYYY&api_key=ZZZZZZ" | jq .[]

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