A Script To Generate An Arch Linux Image

Create a disk image for use as a Virtual Machine in kvm or other hypervisors

Posted by Tobias Begalke on Wed Jun 1 2016
In Linux
Tags linux virtualization scripts

Arch-Linux-Bootstrap: A Script to bootstrap an Arch Linux image

The scripts in this package can be used to generate a minimal disk image of Arch Linux, i.e. as a base for virtual machines. The images are geared towards libvirt/kvm but it shouldn’t be much of a problem to adapt the scripts for other environments.

Download

You can clone the script repository on GitHub: https://github.com/elcamino/arch-linux-bootstrap.

Features

The image includes a fully configured instance of vim with full syntax highlighting and auto-completion for Go, Ruby and many other programming languages supported by vim natively.

The vim setup also includes the airline package for a pretty status line.

Via command line flags the bootstrap script will install the Arch Linux base devel packages, Go, Ruby and Git.

Usage

In order to create an image you need to run bootstrap.sh as root in Arch Linux.

bootstrap.sh supports the following parameters:

  • --locales="de_DE.UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8" The list of locales to install
  • --default-locale=de_DE.UTF-8 Use this locale as default locale
  • --console-keymap=de-latin1 Use this keymap as the console keymap
  • --console-font=lat9w-16 Use this font as the console font
  • --user=arch bootstrap.sh creates one user with this login name
  • --password=arch the password for the newly created user
  • --hostname=arch-minimal the machine’s hostname
  • --timezone="Europe/Berlin" the machine’s timezone
  • --with-go install go and set up an environment for the newly created user (default: no)
  • --with-ruby install ruby (default: no)
  • --with-git install git (default: no)
  • --with-devel install the base-devel packages for Arch Linux (default: no)

Network setup

The default script assumes that the first network interface ist called ens3 and that the interface is setup via dhcp.

If your setup is different, place your network configuration files in the network directory and the bootstrap script will install and activate all networks you need.

Partition Auto-Resizing

The image only consists of one filesystem on the entire disk. There are no partitions.

The system is configured to resize /dev/vda to its full extent every time it boots. If your hard disk has a different name, e.g. /dev/xvda, change /dev/vda to the actual name in systemd/resize-rootfs.service

SSH Setup

SSH is enabled by default. Place all keys that need to be able to log into the machine in ssh/authorized_keys.

Example

sudo ./bootstrap.sh --locales="en_US.UTF-8 fr_FR.UTF-8" \
  --default-locale=en_US.UTF-8 \
  --user=bob \
  --password=bobspassword \
  --hostname=bearclaw.scw.systems \
  --timezone="America/Los_Angeles" \
  --with-go \
  --with-ruby \
  --with-devel \
  --with-git

Photo Credits

Desert Arch by Ryan Smith, licensed unter CC BY-SA 2.0.