Packer Arch Linux Minimal

This repository contains a packer configuration, install script, and provisioning script that together are capable of building a minimal Arch Linux vagrant box.

Features

I had simplicity in mind when creating this box. It has the following features.

• Always up to date
• All space on / partition
• No Swap
• Only the base package group, a kernel, GRUB, OpenSSH and sudo; install base-devel yourself if you need it
• No docs, man pages or translations (configured via NoExtract in /etc/pacman.conf)
• OpenSSH installed and running
• VirtualBox Guest Additions (virtualbox box) or QEMU guest agent (libvirt box) installed

Requirements

• Packer 1.7+ (plugins are installed automatically by packer init)
• One of:
  • VirtualBox on an x86_64 host, for a virtualbox box (VirtualBox on Apple Silicon cannot run x86_64 guests)
  • QEMU, for a libvirt box

Build instructions

$ git clone git@github.com:ChrisOrlando/packer-archlinux-minimal.git
$ cd packer-archlinux-minimal
$ ./build.sh -only=virtualbox-iso.archlinux   # or -only=qemu.archlinux
$ vagrant box add --name archlinux-minimal archlinux-virtualbox.box

Running ./build.sh with no arguments builds both boxes. Any extra arguments are passed to packer build.

On a host without KVM (such as an Apple Silicon Mac) the QEMU build has to fully emulate x86_64. Tell it to, and give the live ISO more time to boot. This takes around 10 minutes:

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/packer qemu
$ ./build.sh -only=qemu.archlinux -var qemu_accelerator=tcg -var shell_wait=240s

The latest ISO is fetched from https://geo.mirror.pkgbuild.com/iso/latest and verified against its sha256sums.txt. Use a different mirror with ./build.sh -var mirror_url=https://example.com/archlinux/iso/latest.

Resources used to create this

• https://github.com/elasticdog/packer-arch
• https://gist.github.com/Phaeilo/541f0361678ee07bf594
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Installation_guide