CWAL

cwal is an m4 macro library for generating shell scripts to automate the low-level installation of BSD and GNU/Linux hosts.

Its name is a reference to the cheat code for instant unit production in a particular RTS game, reflecting the desire to eliminate delays from manual drudgery.

Design

cwal handles the initial bootstrapping within a live CD/USB environment to provision a self-sufficient base system. The result is intended to be a fairly generic instance from a user perspective, amenable to further specialization (configuration and deployment of specific services) through a configuration management tool such as Ansible.

Although similar in objective to Debian preseed and Red Hat kickstart, shell-based execution enables finer-grained control than what is normally possible with mainstream installers: custom partitioning schemes, block device encryption, OS hardening, etc.

Particular emphasis is placed on minimalism:

• Concise parameterization: Machine-specific install scripts are expanded from terse declarative configurations. The macro DSL aims to enhance composability of different options while minimizing boilerplate and redundancy.
• Standard infrastructure: The shell scripts rely only on external utilities included with the stock live CD/USB installer images released by the distro maintainer; no additional packages are required.
• Single file: The output is a self-contained script to simplify deployment using command-line HTTP clients (fetch(1)).

For a local machine, the installation flow generally consists of several distinct phases:

1. Volume partitioning
2. Filesystem formatting
3. Distribution download and extraction
4. Kernel and initramfs build (if applicable)
5. Bootloader configuration

Requirements

• Build
  • POSIX.1-compliant m4 (e.g., BSD and GNU m4)
  • GNU make
• Run
  • FreeBSD: network install images (*-bootonly.iso or *-mini-memstick.img)
  • Gentoo: minimal installation CD (install-amd64-minimal-*.iso)
  • EC2: AWS CLI

Addendum

• Default root password: can'twaitanylonger