Installation on a headless host

This page documents the installation procedure for Alpine Linux on a headless host i.e a system without a keyboard, mouse & display to interact with but otherwise available only through a network connection.

Note: These steps still require physical access to the headless host. Somebody has to insert the Install media and power up the headless host.

Custom install media preparation steps

A Custom-made headless apkovl file can be created as per the below process.

Todo: Verification of the below steps and adding missing details(if any) is needed

• Booting the install media on some computer with a display and keyboard attached, or in a virtual machine, and doing an intermediate "diskless" setup of just the boot media (more details below), i.e. using the offical setup-alpine to configure the system's network, possibly for dhcp if needed, a ssh server, and a login user.
• Choosing "disks=none" for now, yet, configure to store configs on the boot media (if it is writable, otherwise on a separate storage media).
• Use lbu commit to store the configs as local backup. Then your completed setup, including its securely created own private keys, will readily get (re)loaded on every subsequent (headless) boot from your custom-build <hostname>.apkovl.tar.gz stored on the boot media (or on an auxilary media or server location, in case the boot media is read-only).

Headless bootstrap

Note: The author of Headless bootstrap repository is macmpi, maintainer of a number of raspberrypi* packages.

To Install Alpine Linux on a headless host, a bootstrapping configuration overlay file headless.apkovl.tar.gz may be added as-is at the root of Alpine Linux Installation media.

To enable wifi, create a file wpa_supplicant.conf in the install media as follows:

Contents of wpa_supplicant.conf

country=FR network={ key_mgmt=WPA-PSK ssid="mySSID" psk="myPassPhrase" }

Alternately, wpa_passphrase utility from wpa_supplicant package can be used to create the encrypted version of the above file as follows: wpa_passphrase 'mySSID' 'myPassPhrase' > wpa_supplicant.conf The above encrypted version of the wpa_supplicant.conf file may be placed in the Install media.

With the above setup, the usual Installation steps can be performed remotely using ssh. Use the nmap tool from nmap package as follows: nmap -v -sn 192.168.1.0/24 to find the ip of your headless host.

See also

• Diskless page with information on apkovl
• Alpine local backup
• Bootstrap Alpine Linux on a headless system using pre-built apkovl overlay file.