This tool installs Arch Linux into a USB drive, making it a customized live Arch Linux bootable drive. It was inspired by this article. The USB drive should be bootable both by UEFI and legacy boot.

Installation

You can either build the project using cargo build or install the alma package from AUR.

Requirements

This tool should be ran from an exiting Arch Linux installations. It depends on the following tools:

sgdisk
partprobe
Arch install scripts
mkfs.fat
mkfs.btrfs

Dependencies will be handled for you if you install alma from AUR.

Usage

sudo alma create /dev/disk/by-id/usb-Generic_USB_Flash_Disk-0:0

This will wipe the entire disk and create a bootable installation of Arch Linux. As a precaution, this tool will refuse to work with drive paths which don't start with /dev/disk/by-id/usb-.

After the installation is done you can either boot from it immediately or use arch-chroot to perform further customizations before your first boot.

Flags

-p / --extra-packages - Specify extra packages to install. For example: -p htop tmux
-i / --interactive - Drop you into interactive chroot to perform further customization

What exactly does it do?

This tool doesn't aspire to be a generic installer for Arch Linux. Instead, it does the minimum steps required to create a bootable USB with a few tweaks.

Partition the disk as suggested here. The last partition will be formatted as BTRFS
Bootstrap the system using pacstrap -c. The -c flag will use the host's cache instead the drive's cache, which will speed up things when you create multiple drives. This tool will install the base system, grub, intel-ucode, NetworkManager and btrfs-progs
Generate initramfs without the autodetect hook
Set NetworkManager to start at boot
Install GRUB in both legacy and UEFI modes