setup-alpine

Now that you are booted in, you can log-in without a password as the root user. Alpine has a script called setup-alpine, which performs basic installation procedures. This section of the handbook describes its operation modes, as well as how to use it. However, no script is perfect, so it is recommended that if your use-case is not so simple, or you run into issues using it, to proceed to the next section which covers manual setup. For example, if you have no access to a wired network, you will need to configure Networking yourself.

setup-alpine -q

The q, or "quick" mode of the setup-alpine script allows one to get a trivial system configuration running quickly, to then proceed with other installation tasks, possibly remotely.

Under quick mode, setup-alpine will:

  • Setup your Keyboard Layout

  • Initialize your Hostname to the default "alpine" value

  • Set your primary (autodetected) interface to use DHCP, and start networking

  • Enable various relevant system services, and start them

  • Generate a valid /etc/hosts file

  • Enable the default repository

`setup-alpine’s networking set-up will not work by itself for wifi. If you have no access to an ethernet port and cable, refer to the section on configuring networking manually.

Quick mode is useful to get a system online and operational very quickly (thus the name) to then go on to use it manually.

The steps quick mode skips are, in order:

  • Setting a root password

  • Setting the timezone

  • Setting up an optional proxy

  • Enabling SSH

  • Enabling NTP synchronization

  • Configuring the disk, if any

  • Configuring lbu

  • Configuring apk’s caching mechanism

Full setup-alpine

setup-alpine in normal mode will do all of the abovementioned steps, under some conditions, and will rely much less on default values.

It is recommended to use this mode directly if your scenario is trivial. A trivial scenario is defined as such:

  • You have a single (currently) physical disk and you want to install to it

  • Your primary network connection is wired, and it is DHCP-compatible

  • You do not significantly care about what bootloader or filesystem you use

If all of these apply, you can simply run setup-alpine and follow the prompts to set up your system. If they do not, it may still be appropriate, but you will need to customize its behavior with an answer file and/or environment variables.

Answer Files

You can preprogram various answers to setup-alpine 's questions. setup-alpine -f ANSWER_FILE will use settings from the file ANSWER_FILE instead of asking questions interactively. setup-alpine -c ANSWER_FILE will create a new answer file with the following default values. You can edit this file and use it with setup-alpine -f.

# Example answer file for setup-alpine script
# If you don't want to use a certain option, then comment it out

# Use US layout with US variant
KEYMAPOPTS="us us"

# Set hostname to alpine-test
HOSTNAMEOPTS="-n alpine-test"

# Contents of /etc/network/interfaces
INTERFACESOPTS="auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
    hostname alpine-test
"

# Search domain of example.com, Google public nameserver
DNSOPTS="-d example.com 8.8.8.8"

# Set timezone to UTC
TIMEZONEOPTS="-z UTC"

# set http/ftp proxy
PROXYOPTS="http://webproxy:8080"

# Add a random mirror
APKREPOSOPTS="-r"

# Install Openssh
SSHDOPTS="-c openssh"

# Use openntpd
NTPOPTS="-c openntpd"

# Use /dev/sda as a data disk
DISKOPTS="-m data /dev/sda"

# Setup in /media/sdb1
LBUOPTS="/media/sdb1"
APKCACHEOPTS="/media/sdb1/cache"

You can also add extra environment variables to configure the behavior of any given utility. For more details on those, see the next section of the user handbook, or the developer handbook on the technical details of those utilities.