bootstrap-vz is a bootstrapping framework for Debian. It is is specifically targeted at bootstrapping systems for virtualized environments. bootstrap-vz runs without any user intervention and generates ready-to-boot images for a number of virtualization platforms. Its aim is to provide a reproducable bootstrapping process using manifests as well as supporting a high degree of customizability through plugins.
bootstrap-vz was coded from scratch in python once the bash script architecture that was used in the build-debian-cloud bootstrapper reached its limits.
The end-user documentation for bootstrap-vz is available at andsens.github.io/bootstrap-vz. There, you can discover what the dependencies for a specific cloud provider are, see a list of available plugins and learn how you create a manifest.
bootstrap-vz has a master branch for stable releases and a development for, well, development.
After checking out the branch of your choice you can install the python dependencies by running
python setup.py install
. However, depending on what kind of image you'd like to bootstrap,
there are other debian package dependencies as well, at the very least you will need debootstrap
.
The documentation explains this in more detail.
Note that bootstrap-vz will tell you which tools it requires when they aren't present (the different packages are mentioned in the error message), so you can simply run bootstrap-vz once to get a list of the packages, install them, and then re-run.
The API documentation, development guidelines and an explanation of bootstrap-vz internals can be found at bootstrap-vz.readthedocs.org.
Contribution guidelines are described on the CONTRIBUTING file. There's also a topic on the documentation regarding the coding style.