fossable / goldboot

People usually don't reinstall their OS from scratch very often. When they do, chaos ensues the moment they reach that pristine desktop or terminal. Settings get changed, applications are installed, bloatware is removed, files are downloaded here and there. The system is generally altered from its original state into a new "customized" state by a manual flurry of mouse clicks and key presses. This standard approach is like _mutable infrastructure_, meaning you mutate the state of your system repeatedly until it eventually suits your needs. And when something goes awry, you have to make the necessary changes to get it back in line. For most people, mutable infrastructure works out fine until something major breaks or they have to migrate to a new computer altogether. In these cases, they probably end up starting over from scratch and reapply their changes again (and probably slightly differently this time). Sophisticated computer elites probably practice _immutable infrastructure_. Meaning that, every time they boot their system, its state begins almost identically to the time before. Any changes that are made during the course of runtime vanish on reboot. This approach has some real benefits, but requires quite a bit of effort from the user. is a tool that builds machine images for real hardware that can help you achieve something close to immutable infrastructure without creating a lot of extra work for yourself. In the approach, you create a declarative configuration file for each machine that you want to deploy. Using this configuration, builds an image either on your local machine or on a CI platform like Github Actions. The resulting image can be deployed to real hardware via a USB drive or through PXE boot. **Warning: this tool is totally unfinshed and should be used for testing only! Proceed at your own risk!** is approximately what you would get if and were mixed together. Instead of building containers or virtual machines, builds images for real hardware. These machine images (also known as _golden images_) contain your operating system(s), applications, software patches, and configuration all rolled into one easily deployable package. Like Docker images, your images can be stored in a registry and pulled onto real hardware. Installation Docker Install from DockerHub Crates.io Install from crates.io Arch Linux Install from the AUR Nixpkgs Install from nixpkgs Github Releases Install manually from Github releases Dependencies Github Actions Running on Github actions Building golden images with CI is common practice, so there's also a Github action to make it easy: Examples The goldboot-examples repo contains example configurations of all supported OS types and system architectures. They are built on a weekly schedule against the latest version of . | Linux | Windows | macos | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Example walkthrough Let's build a basic Arch Linux image to prove we're _real_ Linux users. First, create a directory to hold our configuration (which can later be tracked in version control): Initialize the directory and choose to start with: This will create which contains configuration options that can be tweaked to suit your needs. For example: There are many ways to customize the image, but for now just build it: Once the build succeeds, the image will be saved to the system's library directory. To deploy the image to the local machine, install goldboot along with the image to your boot partition: If you don't have enough storage space under , you can alternatively install to a USB drive by setting . Now you should be able to boot into goldboot: Select the source image and target disk and off you go. Configuring the easy way Goldboot comes with an LSP server to make editing easier. To use it, configure your editor to use as an LSP server for files named . Helix