Install Alpine Linux in chroot

This alpine-chroot-install script simplifies installation of Alpine Linux for testing purposes on any x86_64 Linux system using chroot(1). Optionally it also utilizes qemu-user and binfmt to emulate different architecture.

The main purpose of this script is to easily create Alpine environment on Ubuntu-based CI services (e.g. Travis CI and similar) and possibly emulate other architectures (e.g. ARM) on x86_64-only CI service.

Installation of Alpine Linux is a matter of a few seconds… 5 seconds to be more specific. It takes just ~5 seconds to prepare a chroot, install fresh Alpine including gcc build environment and execute first command! And it doesn’t use any prebuilt rootfs archive or image, and no Docker, of course. All you need to install Alpine Linux is just apk-tools — Alpine’s package manager — which is automatically downloaded by this script.

Note: If you use GitHub Actions, you’re better off using jirutka/setup-alpine instead of this script.

Requirements

Linux system with common userland (Busybox or GNU coreutils)
POSIX-sh compatible shell (e.g. Busybox ash, dash, Bash, ZSH)
qemu-user ≥ 2.6 and binfmt, or apt-get (needed only for emulation of different architecture)

Note that Alpine binaries needs up-to-date version of QEMU. If you encounter error qemu: Unsupported syscall, it means that your QEMU version is too old. If you can’t upgrade QEMU (package qemu-user-static on Debian/Ubuntu), try an older Alpine Linux branch (option -b, e.g. -b v3.11).

Usage

Read documentation in alpine-chroot-install. See .github/workflows/ci.yml for GitHub Actions example.

You can copy alpine-chroot-install into your repository or download it on demand, e.g.:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alpinelinux/alpine-chroot-install/v0.14.0/alpine-chroot-install \
    && echo 'ccbf65f85cdc351851f8ad025bb3e65bae4d5b06  alpine-chroot-install' | sha1sum -c \
    || exit 1

License

This project is licensed under MIT License. For the full text of the license, see the LICENSE file.