phisch / archinstall-variants

An archinstall plugin that lets you define and select variations of your configuration.

archinstall-variants

An archinstall plugin that lets you define and select variations of your configuration.

EXPERIMENTAL

Plugin support is currently only available in archinstalls master branch. It is not part of the official release yet, and the plugin API is experimental, which means this plugin could break at any time. Please wait until archinstall Plugin support is official, and this plugin ships a stable release before you use it.

Other than that, have fun experimenting with this!

Usage

When loading this plugin in your config.json, you can define a variants key, which is a dict with variant names as keys, and a variant configuration dicts as values. Running archinstall with a configuration like this, will ask you to select one of your configured variants to install.

After you made your selection, it merges the configuration of the selected variant into the root configuration.

When the value is a list, it extends the base list with the variant list, which allows you to create a variant that for example adds additional packages to the base.

Every other variant value will overwrite or set its base value.

Example

Imagine the following archinstall config.json:

{
  "harddrive": {
    "path": "/dev/sda"
  },
  "packages": [
    "base",
    "base2"
  ],
  "plugin": "https://github.com/phisch/archinstall-variant/raw/master/archinstall-variant.py",
  "variants": {
    "desktop": {
      "hostname": "desktop",
      "packages": [
        "desktop-package"
      ]
    },
    "laptop": {
      "commands": [
        "echo 'i run on the laptop variant'"
      ],
      "harddrive": {
        "path": "/dev/nvme0n1"
      },
      "hostname": "laptop"
    }
  }
}

Running this configuration with archinstall will ask you to select one of the configured variants.

archinstall --config https://path/or/url/to/your/config.json
0: desktop
1: laptop
Select which variant you want to install (default: desktop):

Selecting the desktop variant, will change the configuration into:

{
  "harddrive": {
    "path": "/dev/sda"
  },
  "hostname": "desktop",
  "packages": [
    "base",
    "base2",
    "desktop-package"
  ],
  "plugin": "https://github.com/phisch/archinstall-variant/raw/master/archinstall-variant.py"
}

Selecting laptop on the other hand, would result in:

{
  "commands": [
    "echo 'i run on the laptop variant'"
  ],
  "harddrive": {
    "path": "/dev/nvme0n1"
  },
  "hostname": "laptop",
  "packages": [
    "base",
    "base2"
  ],
  "plugin": "https://github.com/phisch/archinstall-variant/raw/master/archinstall-variant.py"
}

Non-interactive selection

You can also pick a variant with the command line argument called variant, which skips the interactive variant selection if the given variant exists in the config.json:

archinstall --config https://path/or/url/to/your/config.json --variant=laptop
The 'laptop' variant was applied to the arguments.