Alpine Linux install guide

Introduction

The goal of this guide is to set up a minimal installation of Alpine Linux with full disk encryption. Refer to the Alpine installation wiki if encountering any issues

Acquire an installation image

Go to the downloads page https://www.alpinelinux.org/downloads
Under the Standard section, download the x86_64 version

Prepare an installation medium

Linux

Insert a USB flash drive into your PC with at least 2 GB of space available on it.
Find the corresponding block device for the flash drive in /dev folder. Usually it is /dev/sdb1.
Write the image to the flash drive (assuming your flash drive is /dev/sdb1).

Warning

This command will wipe the /dev/sdb1 partition

doas dd bs=4M if=~/Downloads/alpine*x86_64.iso of=/dev/sdb1 conv=fsync oflag=direct status=progress

Windows

Use Rufus

Boot the live environment

Info

Alpine Linux installation images do not support Secure Boot. You will need to disable Secure Boot in your BIOS to boot the installation medium.

Power off your PC.
Insert the flash drive into the computer on which you are installing Alpine Linux.
Power on your PC and press your boot menu key.
Boot the installation medium.

Enter the live environment

Note

nvme0n1 will be used as the target install drive throughout this guide, adapt it to your drive name.

Tip

Change alpine to your desired hostname and system to your desired username.

Change Asia/Dubai to your timezone.

setup-alpine

Select keyboard layout: us
Select variant: us
Enter system hostname: alpine
Which one do you want to initialize?: [enter]
Ip address for [your_interface]?: dhcp
Do you want to do any manual network configuration?: n
New password: [your_root_password]
Retype password: [your_root_password]
Which timezone are you in?: Asia/Dubai
HTTP/FTP proxy URL?: none
Enter mirror number: f
Setup a user?: system
Full name for user system?: system
New password:
Retype password:
Enter ssh key or URL for system: none
Which SSH server?: openssh
Which NTP client to run?: chrony
Which disks would you like to use?: nvme0n1
How would you like to use it?: cryptsys
Erase above disks and continue?: y
Enter passphrase for /dev/nvme0n1p2: [your_encryption_passphrase]
Verify passphrase: [your_encryption_passphrase]

Reboot

You can now reboot and enter into your new installation

Note

Unplug your flash drive after the screen turns black

reboot

Post install

After entering the decryption passphrase, you will be greeted with a similar screen as when you first booted from the flash drive. Login using the credentials that you set, if you followed the example, your username would be system

Add repositories

Note

Testing will not be used by default, but you can install a package from it like so

doas apk add [your_package]@testing

doas apk update
doas apk upgrade

Add swap

doas apk add e2fsprogs-extra
doas fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
doas chmod 600 /swapfile
doas mkswap /swapfile
doas swapon /swapfile
doas cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak
echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | doas tee -a /etc/fstab

doas swapoff /dev/nvme0n1/lv_swap
doas lvremove /dev/nvme0n1/lv_swap
doas lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/nvme0n1/lv_root
doas resize2fs /dev/nvme0n1/lv_root

1
/dev/nvme0n1/lv_swap none swap defaults 0 0

Install Docker

1
export EDITOR=nvim
2
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="$HOME/.config"
3
export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share"
4
export XDG_BIN_HOME="$HOME/.local/bin"
5
export XDG_STATE_HOME="$HOME/.local/state"
6
export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache"
7
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/1000-runtime-dir
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export PATH="$XDG_BIN_HOME:$PATH"
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export ZDOTDIR="$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh"

doas apk add docker docker-cli-compose zsh shadow neovim
chsh -s zsh $USER
doas addgroup $USER docker
doas rc-update add docker && rc-service docker start
doas apk del shadow

WG-Easy

If you’re planning to use wg-easy, save yourself hours of troubleshooting by running the following commands

doas apk add iptables ip6tables
doas reboot
doas modprobe ip_tables
doas echo 'ip_tables' >> /etc/modules
doas reboot