A fancy wrapper around dnf --installroot
, apt
, pacman
and zypper
that generates customized disk images with a number of
bells and whistles.
For a longer description and available features and options, see the man page.
You can install mkosi from your distribution using its package manager
or install the development version from git. If you install mkosi using
your distribution's package manager, make sure it installs at least
mkosi v16 or newer (Use mkosi --version
to check). If your
distribution only packages an older version of mkosi, it is recommended
to install mkosi using one of the alternative installation methods
listed below instead.
To run mkosi straight from its git repository, you can invoke the shim
bin/mkosi
. The MKOSI_INTERPRETER
environment variable can be set
when using the bin/mkosi
shim to configure the python interpreter used
to execute mkosi. The shim can be symlinked to e.g. /usr/local/bin
to
make it accessible from the PATH
.
git clone https://github.com/systemd/mkosi
ln -s $PWD/mkosi/bin/mkosi /usr/local/bin/mkosi
mkosi --version
mkosi can also be installed straight from the git repository url using
pipx
:
pipx install git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git
mkosi --version
which will transparently install mkosi into a Python virtual environment
and a mkosi binary to ~/.local/bin
. This is, up to the path of the
virtual environment and the mkosi binary, equivalent to
python3 -m venv mkosivenv
mkosivenv/bin/pip install git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git
mkosivenv/bin/mkosi --version
You can also package mkosi as a
zipapp that you can
deploy anywhere in your PATH
. Running this will leave a mkosi
binary
in builddir/
git clone https://github.com/systemd/mkosi
cd mkosi
tools/generate-zipapp.sh
builddir/mkosi --version
Besides the mkosi binary, you can also call mkosi via
python3 -m mkosi
when not installed as a zipapp.
Please note, that the python module exists solely for the usage of the mkosi binary and is not to be considered a public API.
mkosi can also be used as a kernel-install plugin to build initrds. To
enable this feature, install kernel-install/50-mkosi.install
into /usr/lib/kernel/install.d
. Extra distro configuration for the
initrd can be configured in /usr/lib/mkosi-initrd
. Users can add their
own customizations in /etc/mkosi-initrd
.
Once installed, the mkosi plugin can be enabled by writing
initrd_generator=mkosi-initrd
to /usr/lib/kernel/install.conf
or to
/etc/kernel/install.conf
.
To hack on mkosi itself you will also need
mypy, for type checking, and
pytest, to run tests. We check
tests and typing in CI (see .github/workflows
), but you can run the
tests locally as well.
- Primary mkosi git repository on GitHub
- A re-introduction to mkosi β A Tool for Generating OS Images
- The mkosi OS generation tool story on LWN (2017)
- systemd-repart: Building Discoverable Disk Images and mkosi: Building Bespoke Operating System Images talks at All Systems Go! 2023
- Building RHEL and RHEL UBI images with mkosi an article in Fedora Magazine (2023)
- Building USIs with mkosi
- Constellation π mkosi β Minimal TCB, tailor-made for measured boot
- Streamlining kernel hacking with mkosi-kernel
- mkosi-initrd: Building initrds out of distribution packages
- Running systemd integration tests with mkosi
- Arch Linux rescue image with mkosi
- Building vagrant images with mkosi
Find us on Matrix at #mkosi:matrix.org.