Ansible playbook for building an OS image

I always wanted to be able to customize and add to Arch Linux embedded installs.

The goal here is to have a set of playbooks that generates a storage medium that's supposed to boot and already be usable for a particular application (ex: the alarm setup for my guitar, or MiSTerArch).

Distro

The scripts themselves can be a little neutral to what distro is setup. This project started by targeting Arch Linux ARM, but it has since expanded to Arch's riscv and x86.

It can also be expanded to support Fedora and Debian systems. The main requirements for adding a new distro is for it to be manually installable (ideally by the ability to download a raw rootfs, and the distro not wanting to take over and stomp over the partitioning and bootloader).

Dependencies

• Ansible
• If a foreign architecture is used: qemu-user-static in order to chroot from x86 into it.
• arch-chroot in $PATH from package arch-install-scripts. This is used for non arch distros too.

Arch Linux

pikaur -S ansible arch-install-scripts qemu-user-static qemu-user-static-binfmt

Debian

sudo apt-get install ansible arch-install-scripts qemu-user-static

How to run

Define your inventory (at least for the machine settings), see inventory_template.yml for more details on how or where to put them.

ansible-os-builder% sudo ansible-playbook -i inventory.yml *.play*.yml -v

Tags

After the first successful run, you can probably narrow the --tags you're running, some might be desired to be ran standalone. You can also --skip-tags. --list-tags will give you a complete list of how plays are tagged. Some tags of interest:

• chroot_aquire - creates chroot. It won't clobber it if already there, but should be skipped in order to save time if it is.
• chroot_inventory - if you already have a chroot setup, this is required (add as the first task in the arguments) to add the "chroot" host to the ram based inventory so other tasks can operate on it.
• update - various updates: arch packages