debos [options] <recipe file in YAML>
debos [--help]
Application Options:
-b, --fakemachine-backend= Fakemachine backend to use (default: auto)
--artifactdir= Directory for packed archives and ostree repositories (default: current directory)
-t, --template-var= Template variables (use -t VARIABLE:VALUE syntax)
--debug-shell Fall into interactive shell on error
-s, --shell= Redefine interactive shell binary (default: bash) (default: /bin/bash)
--scratchsize= Size of disk backed scratch space
-c, --cpus= Number of CPUs to use for build VM (default: 2)
-m, --memory= Amount of memory for build VM (default: 2048MB)
--show-boot Show boot/console messages from the fake machine
-e, --environ-var= Environment variables (use -e VARIABLE:VALUE syntax)
-v, --verbose Verbose output
--print-recipe Print final recipe
--dry-run Compose final recipe to build but without any real work started
--disable-fakemachine Do not use fakemachine.
debos is a tool to make the creation of various Debian-based OS images simpler. While most other tools focus on specific use-cases, debos is designed to be a toolchain making common actions trivial while providing enough rope to do whatever tweaking which might be required behind the scenes.
debos expects a YAML file as input and runs the actions listed in the file sequentially. These actions should be self-contained and independent of each other.
Some of the actions provided by debos to customise and produce images are:
- apt: install packages and their dependencies with 'apt'
- debootstrap: construct the target rootfs with debootstrap
- download: download a single file from the internet
- filesystem-deploy: deploy a root filesystem to an image previously created
- image-partition: create an image file, make partitions and format them
- ostree-commit: create an OSTree commit from rootfs
- ostree-deploy: deploy an OSTree branch to the image
- overlay: do a recursive copy of directories or files to the target filesystem
- pack: create a tarball with the target filesystem
- pacman: install packages and their dependencies with pacman
- pacstrap: construct the target rootfs with pacstrap
- raw: directly write a file to the output image at a given offset
- recipe: includes the recipe actions at the given path
- run: allows to run a command or script in the filesystem or in the host
- unpack: unpack files from archive in the filesystem
A full syntax description of all the debos actions can be found at: https://godoc.org/github.com/go-debos/debos/actions
An official debos container is available:
docker pull godebos/debos
See docker/README.md for usage.
sudo apt install golang git libglib2.0-dev libostree-dev qemu-system-x86 \
qemu-user-static debootstrap systemd-container
export GOPATH=/opt/src/gocode # or whatever suits your needs
go install -v github.com/go-debos/debos/cmd/debos@latest
/opt/src/gocode/bin/debos --help
The following example will create an arm64 image, install several packages in it, change the file /etc/hostname to "debian" and finally make a tarball of the complete system.
{{- $image := or .image "debian.tgz" -}}
architecture: arm64
actions:
- action: debootstrap
suite: bookworm
components:
- main
- non-free-firmware
mirror: https://deb.debian.org/debian
variant: minbase
- action: apt
packages: [ sudo, openssh-server, adduser, systemd-sysv, firmware-linux ]
- action: run
chroot: true
command: echo debian > /etc/hostname
- action: pack
file: {{ $image }}
compression: gz
To run it, create a file named example.yaml
and run:
debos example.yaml
The final tarball will be named "debian.tgz" if you would like to modify the fileame, you can provided a different name for the variable image like this:
debos -t image:"debian-arm64.tgz" example.yaml
Example recipes are collected in a separate repository:
https://github.com/go-debos/debos-recipes
debos reads a predefined list of environment variables from the host and
propagates them to the fakemachine build environemnt. The set of
environment variables is defined by environ_vars
in
cmd/debos/debos.go
. Currently the list of environment variables includes
the proxy environment variables documented at:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/proxy_settings
The list of environment variables currently exported to fakemachine is:
http_proxy, https_proxy, ftp_proxy, rsync_proxy, all_proxy, no_proxy
While the elements of environ_vars
are in lower case, for each element
both lower and upper case variants are probed on the host and if found
propagated to fakemachine. So if the host has the environment variables
HTTP_PROXY and no_proxy defined, both will be propagated to fakemachine
respecting the case.
The command line options --environ-var
and -e
can be used to specify,
overwrite and unset environment variables for fakemachine with the syntax:
$ debos -e ENVIRONVAR:VALUE ...
To unset an environment variable, or in other words, to prevent an environment variable being propagated to fakemachine, use the same syntax without a value. debos accepts multiple -e simultaneously.
While the proxy related environment variables are exported from the host to fakemachine, there are two known sources of issues:
-
Using localhost will not work from fakemachine. Use an address which is valid on your network. debos will warn if the environment variables contain localhost.
-
In case you are running applications and/or scripts inside fakemachine you may need to check which are the proxy environment variables they use. Different apps are known to use different environment variable names and different case for environment variable names.
debos (unless running debos with the --disable-fakemachine
argument)
creates and spawns a virtual machine using fakemachine
and executes the actions defined by the recipe inside the virtual machine.
This helps ensure recipes are reproducible no matter the host environment.
Fakemachine can use different virtualisation backends to spawn the virtual machine, for more information see the fakemachine documentation.
By default the backend will automatically be selected based on what is
supported by the host machine, but this can be overridden using the
--fakemachine-backend
/ -b
option. If no backends are supported,
debos reverts to running the recipe on the host without creating a
fakemachine.
Performance of the backends is roughly as follows: kvm
is faster than
uml
is faster than qemu
. Using --disable-fakemachine
is slightly
faster than kvm
, but requires root permissions.
Benchmark times for running pine-a64-plus/debian.yaml on an Intel Pentium G4560T with SSD:
Backend | Wall Time | Prerequisites |
---|---|---|
--disable-fakemachine |
8 min | root permissions |
-b kvm |
9 min | access to /dev/kvm |
-b uml |
18 min | package user-mode-linux installed |
-b qemu |
166 min | none |