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Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2023 17:48:49 +0200
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Guido Trotter <ultrotter@debian.org>
Cc: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: Proof of concept alpine non-interactive autosetup
Message-ID: <20231006174849.6a309b40@ncopa-desktop.lan>
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References: <ZR7Z4SZFDqbZVXEw@z.c.quaqua.net>
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On Thu, 5 Oct 2023 17:44:33 +0200
Guido Trotter <ultrotter@debian.org> wrote:

> Dear alpine devs,
> 
> Thanks a lot for the great work!
> 
> I tried to create a system so that an unmodified Alpine image would
> self-install without user interaction, by passing a custom mini apkovl
> archive.

Nice to see that somebody finally figured out how to do this with apkovl!

> I have tested this on libvirt+kvm in diskless mode, but it should work
> pretty much on any platform where the apkovl can be passed in either
> directly or via an extra block device.
> 
> My initial proof of concept is at:
> https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/ultrotter/alpine-autosetup
> 
> Let me know if you have thoughts, or ideas!

Since alpine 3.18 you can use tiny-cloud and attach a cidata volume
similar to cloud-init's nocloud. This was implemented because the
apkovl way appeared to be too hard for users in general.

Here is how you can provision an alpine vm image using this with qemu:

#!/bin/sh

echo "hostname: alpine-vm" > meta-data

cat >user-data<<EOF
#alpine-config
ssh_authorized_keys:
  - ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIOIiHcbg/7ytfLFHUNLRgEAubFz/13SwXBOM/05GNZe4 ncopa@ncopa-desktop
apk:
  repositories:
    - base_url: https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/
      repos: ["main", "community"]
runcmd:
  - rm /etc/runlevels/*/tiny-cloud*
  - cp -r /home/alpine/.ssh /root/ && chown root:root /root/.ssh
  - lbu include /root/.ssh /home/alpine/.ssh
  - rc-update add cgroups boot
  - rc-update add machine-id boot
  - rc-update add networking boot
  - ERASE_DISKS=/dev/sda setup-disk -m sys /dev/sda
  - poweroff
EOF

xorrisofs -output seed.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock meta-data user-data

qemu-img create a.img 1G

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -hda a.img -hdb seed.iso \
	-cdrom https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.18/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.18.4-x86_64.iso

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -hda a.img

-nc