kulryczech / archinstall

Arch Linux installer - guided, templates etc.

Just another guided/automated Arch Linux installer with a twist. The installer also doubles as a python library to install Arch Linux and manage services, packages and other things inside the installed system (Usually from a live medium).

• archinstall discord server
• archinstall matrix.org channel
• archinstall #archinstall@freenode (IRC)
• archinstall documentation

Installation & Usage

$ sudo pacman -S archinstall

Or simply git clone the repo as it has no external dependencies (but there are optional ones).
Or use pip install --upgrade archinstall to use as a library.

Running the guided installer

Assuming you are on a Arch Linux live-ISO and booted into EFI mode.

# python -m archinstall guided

Scripting your own installation

You could just copy guided.py as a starting point.

But assuming you're building your own ISO and want to create an automated install process, or you want to install virtual machines on to local disk images.
This is probably what you'll need, a minimal example of how to install using archinstall as a Python library.

import archinstall, getpass

# Select a harddrive and a disk password
harddrive = archinstall.select_disk(archinstall.all_disks())
disk_password = getpass.getpass(prompt='Disk password (won\'t echo): ')

with archinstall.Filesystem(harddrive, archinstall.GPT) as fs:
    # use_entire_disk() is a helper to not have to format manually
    fs.use_entire_disk('luks2')

    harddrive.partition[0].format('fat32')
    with archinstall.luks2(harddrive.partition[1], 'luksloop', disk_password) as unlocked_device:
        unlocked_device.format('btrfs')
        
        with archinstall.Installer(unlocked_device, hostname='testmachine') as installation:
            if installation.minimal_installation():
                installation.add_bootloader(harddrive.partition[0])

                installation.add_additional_packages(['nano', 'wget', 'git'])
                installation.install_profile('workstation')

                installation.user_create('anton', 'test')
                installation.user_set_pw('root', 'toor')

This installer will perform the following:

• Prompt the user to select a disk and disk-password
• Proceed to wipe the selected disk with a GPT partition table.
• Sets up a default 100% used disk with encryption.
• Installs a basic instance of Arch Linux (base base-devel linux linux-firmware btrfs-progs efibootmgr)
• Installs and configures a bootloader to partition 0.
• Install additional packages (nano, wget, git)
• Installs a network-profile called workstation (more on network profiles in the docs)

Creating your own ISO with this script on it: Follow ArchISO's guide on how to create your own ISO or use a pre-built guided ISO to skip the python installation step, or to create auto-installing ISO templates. Further down are examples and cheat sheets on how to create different live ISO's.

Help

Submit an issue on Github, or submit a post in the discord help channel.
When doing so, attach any install-session_*.log to the issue ticket which can be found under ~/.cache/archinstall/.

Testing

To test this without a live ISO, the simplest approach is to use a local image and create a loop device.
This can be done by installing pacman -S arch-install-scripts util-linux locally and doing the following:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=./testimage.img bs=1G count=5
# losetup -fP ./testimage.img
# losetup -a | grep "testimage.img" | awk -F ":" '{print $1}'
# pip install --upgrade archinstall
# python -m archinstall guided
# qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -machine q35,accel=kvm -device intel-iommu -cpu host -m 4096 -boot order=d -drive file=./testimage.img,format=raw -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/ovmf/x64/OVMF_CODE.fd -drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly,file=/usr/share/ovmf/x64/OVMF_VARS.fd

This will create a 5GB testimage.img and create a loop device which we can use to format and install to.
archinstall is installed and executed in guided mode. Once the installation is complete,
you can use qemu/kvm to boot the test media. (You'd actually need to do some EFI magic in order to point the EFI vars to the partition 0 in the test medium so this won't work entirely out of the box, but gives you a general idea of what we're going for here)

There's also a Building and Testing guide.
It will go through everything from packaging, building and running (with qemu) the installer against a dev branch.