AutoQEMU - automate installation and SSH setup of ISO OS images

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After reading begriffs "Tips for stable and portable software", the "Begriffs Buildfarm?" section caught my attention, as this is something I would be interested in.

After emailing the author, a public thread began on the subject.

As we discussed how it could be done, I decided to experiment with the idea of automating the setup of virtual environments with QEMU.

This screencast is a simple demo of automating the installation of Alpine Linux 3.12.3 standard x86_64 with AutoQEMU1, which is nothing more than POSIX sh, expect scripts and Makefiles glued together.

As of this writing, I just worked on it for 2~3 days, so everything is still pretty ad-hoc.

The commands from the screencast were2:

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pushd `mktemp -d`
git clone https://euandre.org/git/autoqemu .
make
make install PREFIX=$HOME/.local
autoqemu ssh alpine

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It assumes that $HOME/.local/bin is in $PATH.

  1. The solution was a little too brittle to scale, and some distributions proved to be particularly problematic. I’ve archived my progress if you’re interested in what I’ve done, and maybe wish to continue. ↩

  2. Only now, writing again what I ran on the screencast I thought that I should have tried something like script. Maybe next time (thanks klaatu for the tip!). ↩