agama/autoinstallation

Autoinstallation Support for D-Installer

Introduction

There is always a need for an automatic installation mechanism to support unattended and reproducible mass deployments. D-Installer tries to offer different options to fit user needs. Basically, we have identified these approaches:

• Use a definition which contains the options to use. This definition could be dynamically adjusted based on conditions like hardware, network location, and so on.
• Offer a mechanism (like a CLI) to allow the user find its own way, tweaking the process as much as needed.

Activation

Auto-installation is activated by using dinst.auto=<url> on kernel command line. It can handle three different file formats: JSON, Jsonnet and a plain shell script. So let's describe how they are handled.

Supported formats

JSON/Jsonnet

The user can use JSON or Jsonnet (in case that the profile should be adjusted dynamically) to specify the configuration. You can find some examples in the CLI repository. The JSON representation can be easily obtained by running: dinstaller config show.

When this kind of files are provided through the dinst.auto parameter, D-Installer fetches, validates and processes the file.

Shell Script

A shell script basically gives the user full control. It is expected to use the CLI to interact with D-Installer, but the user can rely on any other tool available in the installation media. So e.g. if user needs to fix a degraded RAID first and then run the probing process again, it is possible. Below there is a minimal working example to install Tumbleweed:

set -ex

/usr/bin/dinstaller config set software.product=Tumbleweed
/usr/bin/dinstaller config set user.userName=joe user.password=doe
/usr/bin/dinstaller install

When a shell script is provided through the dinst.auto parameter, D-Installer fetches and runs the script.