ASAP

Version 0.7.4-alpha

About

ASAP is an automated installation suite for Arch Linux, simplifying a complete installation into typing a few intuitive commands and watching the process on your terminal:

Getting started

ASAP runs in distinct stages:

Stage Number	Stage Overview
Stage 0	Initialize installation resources
Stage 1	Drive partitioning, formatting & mounting
Stage 2	Bootstrapping (pre-chroot)
Stage 3	System setup (post-chroot)

Begin a stage by running the following, where X is the stage number:

asap_stage-X

You can run your own commands in between stages. With the exception of stage 1, no manual intervention is required for a standard installation.

How it works

To check which installation scripts have run successfully, run:

asap_check-progress

This will display the contents of the asap checkpoint-file. Scripts listed in the checkpoint-file will not be run again. This is useful if something went wrong: you can fix the issue and just rerun the stage entirely using asap_stage-X.

To manually add a script to the checkpoint-file, use:

asap_set-checkpoint 'myCheckpoint'

where myCheckpoint is a stage-checkpoint in the form stageX or the filename of a script.

Packages

Asap comes with a few package-lists by default. They define which packages are installed on your base system and can be freely modified. By default, they are limited to a minimal list of linux utilities, including the Saplib library.

Customization

ASAP is customizable and extensible: you can bake your own scripts right into the installation medium, and they will be executed and logged automatically by ASAP. Building your own installation medium is very easy with the provided ASAP archiso-profile and Makefile. Simply add files or edit existing ones to the asap/airootfs/ filesystem and run make build. Adding bash scripts to any of the folders in asap/airootfs/usr/local/lib/asap/stages/ will make ASAP run them automatically during that stage. You can easily add an SSH key or even a WiFi configuration to the ISO using the convenience-scripts, which enables SSH access to the live system without ever connecting a monitor or keyboard. Building an installation image is limited to Arch-based systems though, and requires the archiso package to be installed.

Roadmap

• LVM-on-LUKS Full Disk Encryption Support (almost finished)
• Option to display previews of what each script in a stage does prior to running it