Setting up the build environment on HDD

Introduction

In earlier days, Alpine used a separate Gentoo build environment. Nowadays we build in Alpine itself, and things are much simpler.

We will host this build environment on a HDD installed Alpine, using the "edge" repository.

Another method is to setup a clean Alpine build environment inside another system, using a chroot or some form of virtualization. The host system may also be Alpine, or may be something else.

Boot your build environment

Boot the latest Alpine Linux image on a box with a HDD.

Basic setup

Set basic environment settings (when prompted for disk, select the disk(s) that you wish to use, and use them in sys mode. Note that if you specify two disks, soft raid will be setup on them automatically).

setup-alpine

For more details, see Installation or setup-alpine.

Change your repository to use "edge"

Contents of /etc/apk/repositories

http://dl-4.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main/ http://dl-4.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing/

Note: You can replace 'dl-4' with some other available mirror.

Update/upgrade your system

apk update apk upgrade

Also, add the Alpine SDK:

apk add alpine-sdk

Then reboot your system.

Start building packages

Now you can move on to creating packages for Alpine.