A fancy wrapper around dnf --installroot
, apt
, pacman
and zypper
that generates customized disk images with a number of
bells and whistles.
For a longer description and available features and options, see the man page.
You can install mkosi from your distribution with its package manager or the development version from git. The distribution packages are the preferred way to install mkosi.
The development version of mkosi might require tools from the systemd main
branch, see the action.yaml
for what we currently use in CI.
If you just want to give the development version of mkosi a quick spin you can run
pipx install git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git
which will transparently install mkosi into a Python virtual environment and a mkosi
binary to ~/.local/bin
. This is, up to the path of the virtual environment and
the mkosi binary, equivalent to
python -m venv mkosivenv
mkosivenv/bin/pip install git+https://github.com/systemd/mkosi.git
# the mkosi binary is installed to mkosivenv/bin/mkosi
If you want to help develop mkosi you can run it from your clone of this repository by calling the module
python3 -m mkosi
when you are in the repository top level.
To use your local mkosi checkout without being in the top level of the
repository you can either call the shim bin/mkosi
or make an editable install
into a virtual environment. The MKOSI_INTERPRETER
environment variable can be
set when using the bin/mkosi
shim to configure the python interpreter used to
execute mkosi.
The shim can be symlinked somewhere into your PATH
. To make an editable
install add --editable
to either of the above examples using pip or pipx and
exchange the URL of the repository for the path to your local checkout, e.g
pipx install --editable path/to/yout/local/checkout
For development you will also need mypy, for
type checking, and pytest, to run tests.
We check tests and typing in CI (see .github/workflows
), but you can run the
tests locally as well.
You can also package mkosi as a
zipapp that you can deploy
anywhere in your PATH
. Running this will leave a mkosi
binary in builddir/
tools/generate-zipapp.sh
Besides the mkosi binary, you can also call mkosi via
python -m mkosi
when not installed as a zipapp.
Please note, that the python module exists solely for the usage of the mkosi binary and is not to be considered a public API.
When using git blame, be sure to add --ignore-revs-file .git-blame-ignore-revs
to the arguments to ignore
irrelevant code formatting commits. This can be set permanently via the blame.ignoreRevsFile
git option.
- Primary mkosi git repository on GitHub
- mkosi — A Tool for Generating OS Images introductory blog post by Lennart Poettering
- The mkosi OS generation tool story on LWN