Alpstrap

These are my scripts for bringing up an Alpine system!

DEPENDENCIES

• A sane shell like GNU Bash
• BusyBox (for ash)
• GNU make
• GNU install (from coreutils)
• M4
• GNU Autoconf
• qemu-user-static and its binfmt rules (for cross-chrooting)

You may need to install some Lua dependencies for building apk. If you feel you've already installed them and it's still failing, double-check the Lua version that apk's build requires!

USING

TL;DR, where's the cheat sheet?

Set your PLATFORM, ARCH, and BLKDEV to bootstrap to:

export PLATFORM=raspi ARCH=aarch64 BLKDEV=/dev/sdb

Note

I like to use the lsblk command when locating a BLKDEV.

If your system has doas instead of sudo, be sure to also export an appropriate DOSU environment variable for make to use:

export DOSU=doas

Format your BLKDEV:

make format

Then, install to the BLKDEV of your choosing:

make install

Bootstrapping the base Alpine system

The Alpstrap system first bootstraps the base Alpine system to a DESTROOT directory (an automatically-created destroot directory in this repository's root) for maximum speed.

The system supports bootstrapping to any architecture supported by Alpine and will support even more in the future once rebuilding the Alpine ports tree is automated! All you have to do is specify your desired PLATFORM and ARCH on the GNU make command line as environment variables. The currently supported PLATFORMs are uefi (default) and raspi.

If you want only to bootstrap, there's a make target for that:

make bootstrap

TODO

• Add bootloader installation on UEFI (starting with GRUB)
• Automate cross-compiling ports tree on non-Alpine hosts with only Git submodules.
• Add Bcachefs support
• Make self-hosted installer
• Add PXE-netbooted installer and ad-hoc TFTP server
• Finish raspi /boot partition.
• Share helper scripts with upstream Alpine??

SEE ALSO

• Alpine's wiki page on bootstrapping
• Alpine's wiki page on bootloaders