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archinstall/README.md

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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).

Pre-built ISO's can be found over at https://archlinux.life which autostarts archinstall (in a safe guided mode).

Installation & Usage

Run as stand-alone binary on Live-CD

# curl -L https://archlinux.life/bin/archinstall > archinstall.tar.gz
# tar xvzf archinstall.tar.gz
# cd archinstall-v2.0.4
# chmod +x archinstall
# ./archinstall

This downloads and runs a compiled (using nuitka3) version of the project.
It will guide you through all the installation steps.

Install with pacman on Live-CD

# curl -L https://archlinux.life/bin/archinstall.xz > archinstall.pkg.tar.xz
# pacman -U archinstall.pkg.tar.xz
# archinstall

This requires that the RAM and squashfs on your machine is sufficient for an installation.
But this will utilize pacman to install the pre-compiled binary from above and place archinstall in $PATH.

Install Python on Live-CD and run manually:

# wget https://github.com/Torxed/archinstall/archive/v2.0.4.tar.gz
# tar xvzf v2.0.4.tar.gz
# cd archinstall-2.0.4
# pacman -S --noconfirm python pip
python examples/guided.py

This assumes the same criteria as the pacman installation. It will also guide you through a basic installation.

Install using pip and run as a Python module:

# pip install archinstall
# python -m archinstall guided

This assumes tho that python >= 3.8 and pip is present (not 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 to put on a ISO media

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 --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)

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

# qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -cdrom /home/user/Downloads/archinstall-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

# python -m archlinux guided

End note

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