Creating derivatives

elemental-toolkit is a manifest to share a common abstract layer between derivatives inheriting the same featureset.

High level workflow

The building workflow can be resumed in the following steps:

• Build a container image (docker build / nerdctl build / buildah ..)
• Publish the image (docker push / nerdctl push )
• Build an ISO (elemental build-iso)
• Boot a machine using the ISO and run installation (elemental install)
• Reboot into the installed system

While on the client side, the upgrade workflow is:

• elemental upgrade --system.uri=oci:<image:version>

Single image OS

Derivatives are composed by a combination of specs to form a single image OS.

The container image during installation and upgrade, is converted to an image file with a backing ext2 fs.

Build ISO

To build an iso for a derivative image elemental build-iso command can be used:

elemental build-iso -n $NAME $SOURCE

Where $NAME is the name of the ISO and $SOURCE might be the reference to the directory, file, container image or chaneel we are building the ISO for. $SOURCE should be provided as uri in following format :, where: * - might be [“dir”, “file”, “oci”, “docker”], as default is taken “oci” * - is path to file or directory, channel or image name with tag version (if tag was not provided then “latest” is used)

Some examples for $SOURCE argument “dir:/cOS/system”, “oci:quay.io/repository/costoolkit/releases-green:cos-system-0.8.14-10”

See also building ISOs