Best way to add mounts to fstab at build time?

[sj-ferdinand]

I have a few external hard drives I use across my machines and like to have them mounted to a static and nice path (e.g. /media/TOSHIBA) with extra mount options. On my non-atomic machines I just add them to /etc/fstab and I know I can do that on BlueBuild atomic builds at runtime, but how can I do it directly at build time?

I've tried using a script module to tee -a it into /etc/fstab, but it must get overwritten later in the build because there are no other contents at the time the script runs and my additions aren't present at runtime.

Is there a good way to do that? Should I be using a different method like systemd mount units? (Those are very difficult though so I'd rather avoid them) Or do I just have to make the changes at runtime anyway?

Thanks.

[xynydev]

I generally feel like this is something you're not really supposed to do unfortunately. The custom image you are building is like your own operating system, and operating systems aren't generally meant to make assumptions on what external disks exist and should be mounted at what places.

What I would do:

• Just copy the set of tested known-good lines you want from /etc/fstab on one machine to all other machines

What you can do (as a hacky thing to automate it):

• Bundle a custom script or a just recipe with your image that adds correct lines into /etc/fstab when called by a user
• Create a systemd mount unit and see if that solves the problem

[sj-ferdinand]

Couldn't get systemd mount units to work after a bit of trying so I've just done the first point and copied it all in manually (which worked fine). Just recipes look interesting for that though.

Either way I'm pretty happy with my build setup as is, I just want to automate as much as possible to make my life easy in the long run keeping machines going. Thanks for the tips :)