Installation on a headless host

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

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

Headless bootstrap overlay file

The Headless bootstrap repo provides a ready-to-use overlay file to bootstrap a headless system.
While straightforward to use in default use-case, it also provides many optional settings and advanced modes (unattended installs scripting, secured logon, ssh keys configuration, etc): check homepage for details.

Note: The author of above repo macmpi also maintains a number of raspberrypi* packages for Alpine Linux.

To Install Alpine Linux on a headless host, just add headless.apkovl.tar.gz overlay file as-is (along with optional config files) at the root of the Alpine Linux Installation media, or custom side media.

If using wifi networking, create a file wpa_supplicant.conf in the same location 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 same location.

Boot the system with the above setup: usual Installation steps can then be performed remotely using ssh.
To find the ip of your headless host, one may use the nmap tool from nmap package as follows: nmap -v -sn 192.168.1.0/24

Alternative custom install media preparation steps

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

This material needs expanding ...

Please feel free to help us complete it.

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 overlay file

Alternative custom install media preparation steps

See also