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qemu-arch-linux-automation

Scripts and playbooks to automate the installation, configuration and management of Arch Linux VMs in qemu.

Dependencies

qemu
curl
expect

Installation

Add the path to the src directory to your PATH environment variable
Create a symbolic link to src/ directory to your PATH environment variable

Usage

Install an Arch Linux virtual machine

Usage: qemu-arch install [-o <output-disk-image>] [-a <architecture>] [-s <disk-size>]
        [-m <memory>] [-h <hostname>] [-P <root-password>] [-u <non-root-username>]
        [-p <non-root-user-password>] [-z <timezone>] [-l <locale>] [-M <arch-mirror-url>]

-o <output-disk-image>          Path of the output disk image (default: ./arch.img)
-a <architecture>               Target architecture (default: x86_64)
-s <disk-size>                  Disk size (default: 8G)
-m <memory>                     RAM size in KB (default: 2048)
-h <hostname>                   VM hostname (default: qemu)
-P <root-password>              Root password. If not specified it will be prompted
-u <non-root-username>          Username for the main non-root user
-p <non-root-user-password>     Password for the non-root user. If not specified
                                it will be prompted
-z <timezone>                   System timezone (default: UTC)
-l <locale>                     System locale (default: en_US.UTF-8)
-M <arch-mirror-url>            Arch Linux download mirror URL
                                (default: http://mirror.cj2.nl/archlinux/iso/latest/)
                                Consult https://archlinux.org/download/ for a
                                full list of the available download mirrors.

If you want to install an extra list of packages besides the default ones, then specify them in a file named PKGLIST in the same directory as the disk image file.

If you want to run a custom post-installation script after the core system has been installed, then create a custom script named post-install.sh in the same directory as the disk image file.

Notes

The keyring population process may currently (as of March 2022) take a long time. This is a known issue.

As a workaround, if you want to speed up the OS installation process, you can temporarily disable pacman keyring checks upon package installation by uncommenting the relevant lines in src/helpers/install.sh (function: install_os).

Resizing an existing image

qemu-img resize "$imgfile" +10G

Create a COW (Copy-On-Write) image on top of a disk image

qemu-img create -o backing_file="$imgfile",backing_fmt=raw -f qcow2 img1.cow

This is particularly useful if you want to have a "base" image and several customized images built on it.

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