earthly-raspi-packer

Take the pain out of bootstrapping Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pi.

This is an Earthly pipeline that:

• Spins up an Alpine VM
• Downloads and extracts the Arch Linux ARM rootfs
• Creates a disk image
• Creates a file system and mounts it
• Copies the operating system and bootloader into the image
• Creates an image that can be written to an SD card

In addition, it would be nice if I could have everything configured just the way I want from the get go and be able to smoke test the basics without needing actual hardware.

It's nowhere near production-ready and just scratches my own itch.

Why? This is a solved problem

If you have a Linux box already (WSL is fine), sure you can follow the ten step caveated process. But, then you have to:

• dissassemble your device, since if you're me you have it in a case with a screen.
• use your arthritic fingers that don't want to cooperate to get the tiny SD card out.
• Burn the image on to the card (don't forget to check it!)
• Get it back into the hardware and reassemble
• Boot, set everything up again and hope you don't get yourself into a mess.

Repeat ad-infinitum every time you make a mistake, want to try something else... what a pain. I am of course aware that solutions such as USB-booting, backups, and SSH exist so you can ease some of this. I think computers ought to be nicer than that, even for "technical people" who choose Arch.

I tried a few other alternatives, but they didn't fit my needs or had attributes I didn't like much. That's okay - why not teach myself something?

Current status

The latest commit on master is probably broken. Caveat emptor!

There are incompatibilities whereby loopback mounts/chroots don't play nicely with Podman/Docker so I started working on figuring out getting it to boot inside of QEMU.

Further to this, a script is added that allows for further customisation as part of the first boot:

• Importing SSH keys from Github (using a personal access token and the Github API)
• Creating a custom user account
• Disabling the alarm user
• Setting an initial password
• Initialising the Pacman keyring
• Bringing software up to date
• Installing an AUR package manager
• This is probably going to eventually be fine if I can get it running on the WSL host first.