Build and deploy a custom Arch Linux image for Raspberry Pi 4.

• Ansible >= 2.10
• Packer >= 1.7.0
• Packer builder ARM plugin for Packer

# Required packages on Arch Linux host $ yay -S ansible packer qemu qemu-extra qemu-arch-extra qemu-user-static-bin

The above packages are enough to build Packer images locally (commonly on Gnu/Linux). On MacOS, Windows 10 or when you just don't want to setup Packer and all the tools, Docker is also required:

• Docker >= 20.10

Pre-set packer sources available are:

• ArchLinux ARM armv7 (32-bit)
• ArchLinux ARM aarch64 (64-bit)

Open and edit the variables.pkrvars.hcl file to customize all the desired values.

Build the image using the latest available release:

$ sudo packer build -var-file="variables.pkrvars.hcl" packer/aarch64/

When there's no native way to use qemu-user-static (MacOS or Windows 10) the image can be built using Docker:

$ docker run --rm --privileged \ -v /dev:/dev -v ${PWD}:/build \ packer-builder-arm build \ -var-file="variables.pkrvars.hcl" packer/aarch64/

On Windows 10, the command above should be executed into a WSL2 console.

On GNU+Linux it's a very straightforward process:

# `/dev/sdX` is the device that represents your SD Card $ umount /dev/sdX* $ dd if=custom-rpi.img of=/dev/sdX

Another simple multiplatform tool to flash the image is Balena Etcher available for Windows 10, MacOS and GNU+Linux.

When done, put the SD Card into your Raspberry Pi 4 and Power On the device.

When your machine is up and ready, it should be accessible via SSH using the assigned static IP address (net_address variable), or using hostname.local where hostname is the assigned hostname.

$ ssh -i <path/to/id_rsa> alarm@192.168.0.1

Install required collections and roles:

$ ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Open and edit group_vars/*.yml files to customize the desired values. Once you have made the desired changes, let's configure the system via Ansible running the system.yml playbook:

$ ansible-playbook system.yml