People usually don't reinstall their OS from scratch very often. When they do, chaos ensues the moment they reach that pristine desktop or terminal. Settings get changed, applications are installed, bloatware is removed, files are downloaded here and there. The system is generally altered from its original state into a new "customized" state by a manual flurry of mouse clicks and key presses.
This standard approach is like mutable infrastructure, meaning you mutate the state of your system repeatedly until it eventually suits your needs. And when something goes awry, you have to make the necessary changes to get it back in line.
For most people, mutable infrastructure works out fine until something major breaks or they have to migrate to a new computer altogether. In these cases, they probably end up starting over from scratch and reapply their changes again (and probably slightly differently this time).
Sophisticated computer elites probably practice immutable infrastructure. Meaning that, every time they boot their system, its state begins almost identically to the time before. Any changes that are made during the course of runtime vanish on reboot. This approach has some real benefits, but requires quite a bit of effort from the user.
goldboot
is a tool that builds machine images for real hardware that can help
you achieve something close to immutable infrastructure without creating a lot
of extra work for yourself.
In the goldboot
approach, you create a declarative configuration file for each
machine that you want to deploy. Using this configuration, goldboot
builds an
image either on your local machine or on a CI platform like Github Actions. The
resulting image can be deployed to real hardware via a USB drive or through PXE boot.
Warning: this tool is totally unfinshed and should be used for testing only! Proceed at your own risk!
goldboot
is approximately what you would get if docker
and packer
were mixed together. Instead of building containers or virtual machines, goldboot
builds images for real hardware.
These machine images (also known as golden images) contain your operating system(s), applications, software patches, and configuration all rolled into one easily deployable package.
Like Docker images, your goldboot
images can be stored in a registry and pulled
onto real hardware.
Arch Linux
cd /tmp
curl https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/goldboot.tar.gz | tar xf -
makepkg -si
Github Releases
curl -o /usr/bin/goldboot https://github.com/fossable/goldboot/releases/download/goldboot-v0.0.7/goldboot_<platform>
chmod +x /usr/bin/goldboot
apt-get install -y libudev1 libgtk-4-1 libglib2.0-0
Github Actions
Building golden images with CI is common practice, so there's also a Github action to make it easy:
steps:
- name: Checkout
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Build goldboot image
uses: fossable/goldboot-action@main
with:
config-path: goldboot.json
output-path: image.gb
- name: Save image artifact
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
with:
name: my_image.gb
path: image.gb
The goldboot-examples repo contains example
configurations of all supported OS types and system architectures. They are built on a weekly
schedule against the latest version of goldboot
.
Linux | Windows | macos |
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Let's build a basic Arch Linux
image to prove we're real Linux users.
First, create a directory to hold our configuration (which can later be tracked in version control):
mkdir Test && cd Test
Initialize the directory and choose ArchLinux
to start with:
goldboot init \
--name Test \
--os ArchLinux \
--size 10G \
--format json
This will create goldboot.json
which contains configuration options that can
be tweaked to suit your needs. For example:
{
"alloy": [
{
"os": {
"ArchLinux": {
"hostname": "YeahIUseArch",
"root_password": {
"plaintext": "123456"
}
}
},
"source": {
"Iso": {
"url": "https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/archlinux/iso/2024.01.01/archlinux-2024.01.01-x86_64.iso",
"checksum": "sha256:12addd7d4154df1caf5f258b80ad72e7a724d33e75e6c2e6adc1475298d47155"
}
}
}
],
"arch": "Amd64",
"name": "Test",
"size": "10G"
}
There are many ways to customize the image, but for now just build it:
goldboot cast .
Once the build succeeds, the image will be saved to the system's library directory. To deploy it to a physical disk, you can include the image on a new bootable USB drive:
# THIS WILL OVERWRITE /dev/sdX!
goldboot liveusb --output /dev/sdX --include Test
Once the USB is created, you can use it to boot into the goldboot live environment and select an image to deploy:
Once the image has been deployed, remove the bootable USB drive and reboot the machine.