Alpaquita Linux Installer

An installer of Alpaquita and Alpaquita-like Linux distributions.

Usage

The installer supports cross-libc installations, i.e. it's possible to install a musl Linux instance running on a glibc Linux instance. So the code expects that APK key files are shipped with the package.

For that to work put the keys to the alpaquita_installer/keys directory. Then build the package using the provided setup.py and install it as usual. For example:

# Before doing this, make sure that the Python wheel package is installed
python setup.py bdist_wheel
pip install dist/<the generated wheel file>

To enable installations of Alpaquita-like Linux distributions you may need to update the alpaquita_installer/app/distro.py file.

The installer operates in 2 modes:

• interactive mode with a text-based UI (default mode)
• batch (non-interactive) mode (when -n is passed)

The former performs an installation based on the user's answers in the UI, the latter - in accordance with a provided .yaml file.

Please consult AUTOMATING_INSTALLATION.md for the syntax of the .yaml file.

The interactive mode also generates a setup.yaml file with a description of the current installation.

Passing -h will display the list of all supported command line arguments.

Development environment setup

The code is Python 3, the minimum supported Python version is 3.9.

All necessary dependencies are listed in the provided requirements.txt:

python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
alpaquita-installer [args] # or python -m alpaquita_installer [args]

The tests are written using pytest and can be run with:

pip install pytest
pytest tests/*

Acknowledgements

The code implements parts of the MVC ideas and uses many of Urwid widgets from the Ubuntu Subiquity installer.