Wolfi bootc with niri

Based off the work done in wolfifin, except updated (as of January 25th 2026) and without UKIs

How to use this

Install melange and apko from a package manager (e.g. homebrew), make sure you have bubblewrap installed, and run just keygen. Now run just build-everything and wait a couple of hours for everything to build.

Install to disk image

You need to squash your image's layers down by running just build-containerfile. This is a necessary step thanks to this issue.

Run just generate-bootable-image to install wolfi into bootable.img.

Set the root password

By default, the root password is not set. To set the root password, mount the boot partition of bootable.img:

sudo losetup loop1 ./bootable.img -P
sudo mount /dev/loop1p2 /mnt

Then modify /mnt/loader.conf by commenting out the timeout field:

sudo sh -c 'echo "timeout 3" > /mnt/loader.conf'
sudo umount /mnt
sudo losetup -d /dev/loop1

Now you can put bootable.img into your favorite hypervisor. Press e on the first entry, and then append init=/bin/bash to the commandline, and hit enter. Once you're into the shell, run the following commands:

passwd
(set your password)
exec init

You will now be booting into wolfi.

Run niri

By default, the virtio-gpu modules aren't loaded. To load them, run modprobe virtio-gpu. You need 3d acceleration on your virtual machine to run niri.

Log in as root, and then run niri-session. By default, there isn't a keybind for the terminal (foot). Exit niri with Ctrl+Shift+E, and then edit ~/.config/niri/config.kdl to change the Mod+T keybind to execute foot.

Now re-run niri, and press Super+T. Congratulations, you now have a terminal emulator running inside of niri on a wolfi-bootc system.

Notes

The config for x86_64 kernels is directly copied from Arch Linux. The config for aarch64 kernels is directly copied from debian, updated to 6.18.7's configurations with make oldconfig.

Some of these packages are poorly made. I created this as an experiment to see what wolfi could do in a bootc environment, and to get myself acquainted with apko and melange. So far, I'd call it a success.