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Running Alpine in a chroot on the Lima Ultra

Prerequisites

You need a rooted Lima Ultra.

Sources

The following sources have been used to write this.

Goal

This installs Alpine Linux in a chroot. This lets you install packages not available on the Lima, compile code, run services, etc.

Mount the user partition

The Lima Ultra root partition is only 2 GB, but there is a 3 GB user data partition which can be used for extra space.

We won't add it to fstab in this document, instead we will mount it manually. Feel free to do otherwise.

mkdir /user
mount /dev/disk/by-partlabel/user /user

Now let's create the root directory for the distro.

mkdir /user/alpine

Setup a few variables

You should adapt the mirror URL depending on your location.

export chroot_dir="/user/alpine"
export mirror="http://alpine.42.fr"
export branch="v3.9"

Bootstrap the chroot contents

wget "${mirror}/${branch}/main/armv7/apk-tools-static-2.10.3-r1.apk"
tar -xzf apk-tools-static-*.apk
./sbin/apk.static \
    -X "${mirror}/${branch}/main" \
    -U --allow-untrusted --root "${chroot_dir}" \
    --initdb add alpine-base

mkdir -p "${chroot_dir}/root"
mkdir -p "${chroot_dir}/etc/apk"
echo "${mirror}/${branch}/main" > "${chroot_dir}/etc/apk/repositories"

Create helper scripts

We will store stuff in /alpine.

mkdir /alpine

In that directory, create the file conf.sh...

mountpoint="/user"
chroot_dir="$mountpoint/alpine"

... another file called run...

#!/bin/bash

cd "$(dirname "$0")"
. conf.sh

mount /dev/disk/by-partlabel/user "$mountpoint"

cp /etc/resolv.conf "$chroot_dir/etc/resolv.conf"

mount -t proc none "$chroot_dir/proc"
mount -o bind /sys "$chroot_dir/sys"
mount -o bind /dev "$chroot_dir/dev"

chroot "$chroot_dir" openrc

... and finally shell.

#!/bin/bash

cd "$(dirname "$0")"
. conf.sh

chroot "${chroot_dir}" /bin/sh -l

Make run and shell executable.

chmod +x /alpine/run
chmod +x /alpine/shell

Make it run on boot

Create executable file /etc/init.d/run-alpine:

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    start)
        /home/root/alpine/run
    ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/run-alpine start"
        exit 1
esac
exit 0

Add it to services on boot:

update-rc.d run-alpine defaults

Jump in the Alpine shell and finish configuration

Open the Alpine shell:

/alpine/shell

Add useful packages:

apk add alpine-sdk
apk add nano

To make openrc run in a chroot, create an empty softlevel...

touch /run/openrc/softlevel

... and configure your rc.conf like this:

rc_sys="prefix"
rc_controller_cgroups="NO"
rc_depend_strict="NO"
rc_need="!net !dev !udev-mount !sysfs !checkfs !fsck !netmount !logger !clock !modules"

Finally let's fix a small detail:

ln -s /root /home/root

(Optional) Add the nginx service

Configuration is now complete, but let's add a service to test everything works:

apk add nginx
rc-update add nginx

Reboot

You can now exit the Alpine shell and reboot the Lima.

After boot, if you added nginx, it should listen on port 80.

(Optional) Enable the community repo

Edit /etc/apk/repositories. There should be a single line such as this in it:

http://alpine.42.fr/v3.9/main

Add a second line with community instead of main like this:

http://alpine.42.fr/v3.9/main
http://alpine.42.fr/v3.9/community

Finally, run apk update.