Digital Ocean comes with a wide range of Linux and BSD distributions to choose from as well as a few custom “one-click install” applications for common open-source software such as WordPress and Gitlab. Unfortunately, Digital does not at present have an option for an openSUSE image. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use openSUSE on Digital Ocean, but it is going to be a little more work than most common Linux distributions. This guide should get you up and running with a clean openSUSE install using the “Custom Image” feature provided by Digital Ocean.

The first step is to download an appropriate image of openSUSE. Digital Ocean supports a few different types of images, but for the purposes of this how-to we are going to go with the OpenStack option as scene here on the far right.

The download is not very large and should only take a few minutes. You can do a checksum if you are concerned, but I am going to skip that here for the sake of speed.

The next step is pretty simple — just log into you Digital Ocean account and begin creating a droplet as you normally would but go to the “Custom Image” section instead of the normal droplet creation flow.

From there, you’ll simply upload the image that should have downloaded now for openSUSE. On the off chance that the upload fails, just retry; that happened to me once before I got it working. Also note, that you can name the image whatever you like.

Once the image is uploaded successfully, you can just create a droplet as you normally would selecting your openSUSE image under your “Custom Images” section. Digital Ocean will run you through the normal creation process you’d have with any other Linux distro.

Once the normal droplet creation process is complete, you are good to go you can test it by accessing the droplet via ssh and playing around with Zypper!

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope it was helpful to you! Please follow me on Twitter and reach out to my company The Mad Botter INC if you need any development work done for either the web / cloud or mobile.