bty-lab 0.5.13

Flash images onto target disks, locally or over PXE

bty - flash images onto target disks, locally or over PXE

Image-flash provisioning toolkit for bare-metal and virtual targets. Writes pre-built ("cooked") system images onto target disks - locally from a USB live stick or remotely over PXE - and configures the deployed system on first boot via cloud-init or CIJOE workflows.

bty is one Python package: the bty module, distributed on PyPI as bty-lab, with three console-script entry points:

• bty: main CLI (image inspection, target discovery, flashing, provisioning).
• bty-tui: terminal UI (requires the tui extra). With --server URL it doubles as a remote-flash client against a running bty-web.
• bty-web: HTTP server with browser UI (requires the web extra).

Plus a sibling appliance-image builder under bty-media/ that produces four variants from a shared rootfs overlay: the bootable USB live image (usb-x86), the x86 server appliance (server-x86), the Raspberry Pi 4 / 5 server appliance (server-rpi), and the PXE-chain network-flash live env (netboot-x86).

For a low-friction trial of the bty-web UI without flashing anything, a multi-arch container is published to ghcr.io/safl/bty-web on every release:

docker run -d --name bty-web -p 8080:8080 -v "$PWD/bty-data":/var/lib/bty \
  ghcr.io/safl/bty-web:latest
# -> http://localhost:8080/ui   (login: bty / bty)

Image catalog only - no DHCP / TFTP / PXE proxy in the container (those need bare-metal LAN access; use the appliance for that). See docs/src/walkthrough-server-docker.md.

Install

pipx install bty-lab            # CLI, zero third-party Python deps
pipx install "bty-lab[tui]"     # adds the bty-tui terminal UI
pipx install "bty-lab[web]"     # adds the bty-web HTTP server
pipx install "bty-lab[all]"     # everything

The CLI flow (bty list disks, bty inspect image, bty flash --dry-run) needs only Python 3.11+ and stdlib; full flashing (bty flash --yes) relies on system binaries (dd, qemu-img, zstd, lsblk, etc.) the operator's distribution is expected to provide.

Status

Pre-1.0 but actively shipping. Wheels and appliance images publish to PyPI + GitHub Releases on every tag, and the server + client + PXE-chain end-to-end flow runs in CI on every push. The CLI surface (bty list, bty inspect, bty flash) and the bty-web HTTP/iPXE/PAM-auth surfaces are stable enough to use in homelab / CI fleets. Wire formats and CLI flags may still shift between minor versions until 1.0; the schema_version field on --json output and the Machine wire type are the things to watch. See PLAN.md for the milestone-by-milestone roadmap.

Planning and design

• PLAN.md: roadmap and design intent.
• docs/: full documentation (Sphinx + MyST).

Development

uv is the project's dependency manager. Install it via pipx if you don't already have it:

pipx install uv

Then sync the dev environment:

uv sync --all-extras --group dev

Run the test suite, linter, and type-checker:

uv run pytest
uv run ruff check
uv run mypy src

Documentation

The docs tooling installs as a separate pipx app:

pipx install ./docs/tooling

Then, from inside docs/:

bty-docs-serve              # live-rebuild dev server on :8000
bty-docs-build-html         # one-shot HTML build
bty-docs-build-pdf          # one-shot PDF build (requires LaTeX)

License

GPL-3.0-only.