bsdinstall

This is a fork of bsdinstall, the official FreeBSD installer. The objective is to keep the architecture and workflow, but to make the code more flexible and more easily allow fixing issues and continuous testing.

This project is sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation.

Dependencies

bsdinstall relies on bsddialog in order to render widgets. bsddialog is imported in FreeBSD in contrib/bsddialog, while its upstream is at https://gitlab.com/alfix/bsddialog.

bsdinstall also depends on bsdconfig for its essential routines. bsdconfig is maintained in FreeBSD in usr.sbin/bsdconfig.

References

The upstream code can be obtained at https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/tree/usr.sbin/bsdinstall.

More information about the installer can be found at https://wiki.freebsd.org/BSDInstall.

Known issues in bsdinstall can be browsed at https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&email1=sysinstall%40FreeBSD.org&emailassigned_to1=1&emailcc1=1&emailtype1=equals&list_id=632069&query_format=advanced.

Examples

To build distfetch:

$ sudo pkg install bsddialog
[...]
$ (cd distfetch &&
    CPATH=/usr/local/include make LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -lbsddialog -lfetch")

To build distextract:

$ (cd distextract &&
    CPATH=/usr/local/include make LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -lbsddialog -larchive")

To run individual steps in a sequence:

$ cat > test.sh << EOF
#!/bin/sh

BSDINSTALLDIR="\$PWD"
DESTDIR="\$BSDINSTALLDIR/destdir"
BSDINSTALL_DISTDIR="\$DESTDIR/usr/freebsd-dist"; export BSDINSTALL_DISTDIR
SRCDIR="/usr/src"

TMPDIR="\$(mktemp -d)"; export TMPDIR
for target in "\$@"; do
    BSDCFG_SHARE="\$SRCDIR/usr.sbin/bsdconfig/share" \
        BSDINSTALL_CHROOT="\$DESTDIR" \
        BSDINSTALL_CONFIGCURRENT="yes" \
        BSDINSTALL_SCRIPTS="\$BSDINSTALLDIR/scripts" \
        LOCAL_DISTRIBUTIONS="base.txz kernel.txz lib32.txz" \
        DISTRIBUTIONS="lib32-dbg.txz" \
        ./bsdinstall "\$target"
done
EOF
$ sh test.sh fetchmissingdists checksum distextract