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=encoding utf8
=head1 NAME
febootstrap - Bootstrapping tool for creating supermin appliances
=head1 SYNOPSIS
febootstrap [-o OUTPUTDIR] --names LIST OF PKGS ...
febootstrap [-o OUTPUTDIR] PKG FILE NAMES ...
=head1 DESCRIPTION
febootstrap is a tool for building supermin appliances. These are
tiny appliances (similar to virtual machines), usually around 100KB in
size, which get fully instantiated on-the-fly in a fraction of a
second when you need to boot one of them.
Originally "fe" in febootstrap stood for "Fedora", but this tool is
now distro-independent and can build supermin appliances for several
popular Linux distros, and adding support for others is reasonably
easy.
Note that this manual page documents febootstrap 3.x which is a
complete rewrite and quite different from version 2.x. If you are
looking for the febootstrap 2.x tools, then this is not the right
place.
=head2 BASIC OPERATION
There are two modes for using febootstrap. With the I<--names>
parameter, febootstrap takes a list of package names and creates a
supermin appliance containing those packages and all dependencies that
those packages require. In this mode febootstrap usually needs
network access because it may need to consult package repositories in
order to work out dependencies and download packages.
Without I<--names>, febootstrap takes a list of packages (ie.
filenames of locally available packages). This package set must be
complete and consistent with no dependencies outside the set of
packages you provide. In this mode febootstrap does not require any
network access. It works by looking at the package files themselves.
By "package" we mean the RPM, DEB, (etc.) package. A package name
might be the fully qualified name (eg. C<coreutils-8.5-7.fc14.x86_64>)
or some abbreviation (eg. C<coreutils>). The precise format of the
name and what abbreviations are allowed depends on the package
manager.
The supermin appliance that febootstrap writes consists of two files
called C<hostfiles> and C<base.img> (it is common for users to add
more files). By default these are written to the current directory.
If you specify the I<-o OUTPUTDIR> option then these files are written
to the named directory instead (traditionally this directory is named
C<supermin.d> but you can call it whatever you want).
In all cases febootstrap can only build a supermin appliance which is
identical in distro, version and architecture to the host. It does
I<not> do cross-builds.
=head2 MINIMIZING THE SUPERMIN APPLIANCE
You may want to "minimize" the supermin appliance in order to save
time and space when it is instantiated. Typically you might want to
remove documentation, info files, man pages and locales. We used to
provide a separate tool called C<febootstrap-minimize> for this
purpose, but it is no longer provided. Instead you can post-process
C<hostfiles> yourself to remove any files or directories that you
don't want (by removing lines from the file). Be careful what you
remove because files may be necessary for correct operation of the
appliance.
=head2 KERNEL AND KERNEL MODULES
Usually the kernel and kernel modules are I<not> included in the
supermin appliance. When the appliance is instantiated, the kernel
modules from the host kernel are copied in, and it is booted using the
host kernel.
=head2 BOOTING AND CACHING THE SUPERMIN APPLIANCE
To instantiate and boot the supermin appliance you need to use the
separate tool L<febootstrap-supermin-helper(8)>. For fastest boot
times you should cache the output of that tool. See the libguestfs
source file C<src/appliance.c> for an example of how this is done.
=head2 ENFORCING AVAILABILITY OF HOSTFILES
L<febootstrap-supermin-helper(8)> builds the appliance by copying in
host files as listed in C<hostfiles>. For this to work those host
files must be available. We usually enforce this by adding
requirements (eg. RPM C<Requires:> lines) on the package that uses the
supermin appliance, so that package cannot be installed without
pulling in the dependent packages and thus making sure the host files
are available.
=head1 OPTIONS
=over 4
=item B<--help>
Display brief command line usage, and exit.
=item B<--exclude REGEXP>
After doing dependency resolution, exclude packages which match the
regular expression.
This option is only used with I<--names>, and it can be given multiple
times on the command line.
=item B<--names>
Provide a list of package names, instead of providing packages
directly. In this mode febootstrap may require network access. See
L</BASIC OPERATION> above.
=item B<--no-warnings>
Don't print warnings about packaging problems.
=item B<-o outputdir>
Select the output directory where the two supermin appliance files are
written (C<hostfiles> and C<base.img>). The default directory is the
current directory. Note that if this files exist already in the
output directory then they will be overwritten.
=item B<-v>
=item B<--verbose>
Enable verbose messages.
=item B<-V>
=item B<--version>
Print the package name and version number, and exit.
=back
=head1 SEE ALSO
L<febootstrap-supermin-helper(8)>,
L<http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/>,
L<guestfs(3)>,
L<http://libguestfs.org/>.
=head1 AUTHORS
=over 4
=item *
Richard W.M. Jones L<http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/>
=item *
Matthew Booth L<mbooth@redhat.com>
=back
=head1 COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2009-2010 Red Hat Inc.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
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