cwal is an m4 macro library for generating shell scripts to automate
the low-level installation of BSD and GNU/Linux hosts.
Its name is a reference to the cheat code for instant unit production in a particular RTS game, reflecting the desire to eliminate delays from manual drudgery.
cwal handles the initial bootstrapping within a live CD/USB
environment to provision a self-sufficient base system.
The result is intended to be a fairly generic instance from a user
perspective, amenable to further specialization (configuration and
deployment of specific services) through a configuration management tool
such as Ansible.
Although similar in objective to Debian preseed and Red Hat kickstart, shell-based execution enables finer-grained control than what is normally possible with mainstream installers: custom partitioning schemes, block device encryption, OS hardening, etc.
Particular emphasis is placed on minimalism:
- Concise parameterization: Machine-specific install scripts are expanded from terse declarative configurations. The macro DSL aims to enhance composability of different options while minimizing boilerplate and redundancy.
- Standard infrastructure: The shell scripts rely only on external utilities included with the stock live CD/USB installer images released by the distro maintainer; no additional packages are required.
- Single file:
The output is a self-contained script to simplify deployment using
command-line HTTP clients (
fetch(1)).
For a local machine, the installation flow generally consists of several distinct phases:
- Volume partitioning
- Filesystem formatting
- Distribution download and extraction
- Kernel and initramfs build (if applicable)
- Bootloader configuration
- Build
- POSIX.1-compliant
m4(e.g., BSD and GNUm4) - GNU
make
- POSIX.1-compliant
- Run
- FreeBSD: network install images
(
*-bootonly.isoor*-mini-memstick.img) - Gentoo: minimal installation CD
(
install-amd64-minimal-*.iso) - EC2: AWS CLI
- FreeBSD: network install images
(
- Default root password:
can'twaitanylonger