User:Torxed/Archiso offline

Related articles

• Archiso

Archiso Offline is a addon to the traditional archiso package. Enabling users to build a offline installation ISO based on the official ISO. Much like most other Linux distributions have as their default option, Arch users can create similar ISO builds with this package.

A additional feature of Archiso Offline is AUR packages are possible to include in the ISO build process.

Setup

install archiso-offline-releng^{AUR[broken link: package not found]}, this will also install archiso (or use archiso-git^AUR if installed).

The setup steps after installing this package is mostly identical with Archiso.
However, by default Archiso comes with two "profiles": releng and baseline, Archiso Offline adds one additional profile called offline_releng.

The offline_releng profile replaces all of the online-dependent steps in a normal installation process with locally hosted packages within the ISO. So instead of trying to fetch packages online, packages are sourced from the ISO directly.

The build process enables this by by sourcing the packages.x86_64 and running pacman --noconfirm -w --cachedir ... <packages> and placing the files in a HTTP-like structure under /srv/http. Then pointing the ISO pacman.conf to that structure.
AUR packages are also sourced, but cached a little bit differently. But AUR packages are sourced from packages.aur.
The full list of packages sourced by default are base base-devel and any packages listed in packages.x86_64 from the official releng config.

Additional packages can be added as described in Archiso#Profile structure

Installing packages

Follow the same procedure as described in Archiso#Packages, the only difference being packages.aur which is a additional feature in the build process, enabling the possibility to include AUR Packages into the offline medium.

Note: If AUR packages are found by the build process, a build-user will be automatically created with "%wheel ALL=(ALL) NO" sudoers permission. It's a known issue and a long term bad solution. Make sure your sudoers file looks correct after building your offline ISO for now.

Build the ISO

Again, assuming you have followed the Archiso documentation, more specifically the Archiso#Build the ISO steps, you should have a ISO under ~/archlive/out/.

Example build process

Example of installation steps:

# mkdir -p /tmp/archiso-offline
# cd /tmp/archiso-offline
# wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/archiso-offline-releng.tar.gz
# tar xvzf archiso-offline-releng
# cd archiso-offline-releng
# makepkg -s
# pacman -U *.zst

The actual build process:

# mkdir -p /tmp/iso_build_dir
# cp -r /usr/share/archiso/configs/offline_releng/* /tmp/iso_build_dir/
# cd /tmp/iso_build_dir
# echo "python" >> packages.x86_64
# echo "lighttpd2-git" >> packages.aur
# echo "systemctl enable lighttpd2" >> ./airootfs/root/customize_airootfs.sh
# rm -rf work*
# ./build.sh -v
# file out/*.iso

And that should be it. This example installs python to the live ISO environment as well as lighttpd2-git^AUR. It also enables auto-start of lighttpd2 once the ISO boots.

See also

Documentation and tutorials

• Archiso project page
• Official Archiso documentation

Example build script

• Four types of build scripts for Archiso Offline.

Known shortcommings

A few things and issues are known in this project.
The first being that some packages might want to be hosted locally, but not installed locally in the ISO environment. As of today there is no good solution for this, so all packages declared in packages.{x86_64, aur} are both installed - and hosted in the ISO environment.

Another big issue is the AUR build-user. There is no clear way to solve this, but there are better solutions than the one in place today. Especially the use of sudoers.