This is a tool to generate an Alpine Linux custom image for Digital Ocean. This ensures that the droplet will correctly configure networking and SSH on first boot using Digital Ocean's metadata service. To use this tool make sure you have qemu-nbd, qemu-img, bzip2 and e2fsprogs installed. This will not work under the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as it mounts the image during generation.
Once these prerequisites are installed, clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/benpye/alpine-droplet.git
Initialise the 'alpine-make-vim-image' submodule
cd alpine-droplet/
git submodule init
git submodule update
run:
# sudo ./build-image.shNote: Need root permission.
2022-02-03: After cloning, cd-ing into repo, I see:
$ sudo ./build-image.sh
./build-image.sh: 13: ./build-image.sh: ./alpine-make-vm-image/alpine-make-vm-image: not found
We need the https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image repo as a submodule, so:
$ git submodule init
Submodule 'alpine-make-vm-image' (https://github.com/alpinelinux/alpine-make-vm-image.git) registered for path 'alpine-make-vm-image'
$ git submodule update
Cloning into 'alpine-make-vm-image'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 296, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (37/37), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (26/26), done.
remote: Total 296 (delta 15), reused 28 (delta 9), pack-reused 259
Receiving objects: 100% (296/296), 62.33 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (167/167), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
Submodule path 'alpine-make-vm-image': checked out 'b0f0a05b1848e0ff363cfbb36bf319fc02132caa'
OK, let's try building again:
$ sudo ./build-image.sh
> apk not found, downloading static apk-tools
ERROR: cannot verify gitlab.alpinelinux.org's certificate, issued by ‘CN=R3,O=Let's Encrypt,C=US’:
Issued certificate has expired.
To connect to gitlab.alpinelinux.org insecurely, use `--no-check-certificate'.
Self-explanatory error. Workaround (not fix) is to modify alpine-make-vm-image's 'wgets()' function to ignore SSL cert errors:
vim alpine-make-vm-image/alpine-make-vm-image
On line 309, change:
&& wget -T 10 --no-verbose "$url" \
to
&& wget --no-check-certificate -T 10 --no-verbose "$url" \
And try again:
$ sudo ./build-image.sh
...
muchas textas
...
Seems to have completed. Let's check:
$ ls -lh *.bz2
42M alpine-virt-image-2022-02-03-1802.qcow2.bz2
Which looks 42Mb closer to the output anticipated below:
This will produce alpine-virt-image-{timestamp}.qcow2.bz2 which can then be uploaded to Digital Ocean and used to create your droplet. Check out their instructions at https://blog.digitalocean.com/custom-images/ for uploading the image and creating your droplet.
In this commit, the script will produce alpine version 3.15 image. If you wanna build latest version, you can pull latest alpine-make-vm-image repo: git submodule foreach git pull origin master
That git step completed silently but with no obvious difference on my system. Hence the manual intervention logged above.
Next step is to familiarise with Digital Ocean's image upload procedure. That import worked fine for me, producing a functional droplet. Be careful, while building the droplet in Digital Ocean's control panel, to make sure you include your ssh keys and, if you are a long-time Digital Ocean customer, that your ssh keys are ed22519 or better.
Thanks Ben Pye, jirutka and, of course, the wonderful Alpine Linux team.