arch-boxes

• Vagrant Cloud
• Download latest artifacts

Arch-boxes provides automated builds of the Arch Linux releases for different providers and formats.

Usage

Vagrant

If you're a vagrant user, you can just go to our Vagrant Cloud page and follow the instructions there.

Plain qcow2 image

If you want to use the plain qcow2 image with

qemu

You can use this snippet to always get the most recent image and check its integrity (you need to install

hq

most_recent=$(curl -Ls 'https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/arch-boxes/-/jobs/artifacts/master/browse/output?job=build:secure' | grep cloudimg | grep -vi sha256 | hq a attr href | sed "s|artifacts/file|artifacts/raw|")
curl -LO  "https://gitlab.archlinux.org$most_recent"{,.SHA256}
sha256sum -c $(basename $most_recent).SHA256

Development

Dependencies

You'll need the following dependencies:

• vagrant (for vagrant images)
• qemu

How to build this

The official builds are done in our Arch Linux GitLab CI.

./build-host.sh

Development workflow

Merge requests and general development shall be made on the

master

We have CI in place to build all images even for merge requests.

Release workflow

Releases are done automatically via GitLab CI schedule. No manual intervention is required or desired.

Checking cloud-init support in our qcow2 images:

$ packer build -only=cloud -except=sign config.json
$ cp Arch-Linux-cloudimg-2020-02-24.qcow2 disk.qcow2

Copied from (with minor changes): https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/datasources/nocloud.html
$ { echo instance-id: iid-local01; echo local-hostname: cloudimg; } > meta-data
$ printf "#cloud-config\npassword: passw0rd\nchpasswd: { expire: False }\nssh_pwauth: True\n" > user-data
create a disk to attach with some user-data and meta-data (require cdrkit)
$ genisoimage -output seed.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock user-data meta-data
create a new qcow image to boot, backed by your original image
$ qemu-img create -f qcow2 -b disk.qcow2 boot-disk.qcow2
boot the image and login as 'arch' with password 'passw0rd'
note, passw0rd was set as password through the user-data above,
there is no password set on these images.
$ qemu-system-x86_64 -m 256 
   -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 
   -drive file=boot-disk.qcow2,if=virtio 
   -drive file=seed.iso,if=virtio