archinstall 2.0.3

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 access each individual installation step for customized installs.

Pre-built ISO's can be found here which autostarts archinstall (in a safe guided mode): https://hvornum.se/archiso/

• archinstall discord server
• archinstall documentation (TBA)
• archinstall guided install ISO's: https://hvornum.se/archiso/ (Being re-built to v2.0)
• archinstall on #archinstall@freenode (IRC)

Usage

Run on Live-CD (Binary)

Currently this method is not supported until v2.1.0, this due to the rework of the contextualized approach.

# wget https://gzip.app/archinstall
# chmod +x archinstall; ./archinstall

This downloads and runs a "compiled" (using nuitka) version of the project.
It defaults to starting a guided install with some safety checks in place.

Run on Live-CD with Python:

# wget https://github.com/Torxed/archinstall/archive/v2.0.2.tar.gz
# tar xvzf v2.0.2.tar.gz
# cd archinstall-2.0.2
# pacman -S --noconfirm python; python examples/guided.py

This will ask for a disk and start a guided installation.

Run using PIP and Python module:

# pip install archinstall
# python -m archinstall guided

This assumes tho that python >= 3.8 and pip is present (not always the case on the default Arch Linux ISO), see above for pre-built ISO's containing Python+pip or follow the docs to see how to build an ISO yourself.

Scripting an installation

Assuming you're building your own ISO and want to create an automated install process.
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')

                installation.add_AUR_support()

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)
• Adds AUR support by compiling and installing yay

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.

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 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)

You can also run a pre-built ISO with pip and python

# qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cdrom /home/user/Downloads/archlinux-2020.07.08-x86_64.iso -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

and once inside, just do

# pip install archlinux
# python -m archlinux guided

End note