Disk & Account Setup
The installer is a plain Python TUI (python-textual) that walks disk, account, and locale setup before handing off to archinstall.
The TUI walks through:
- Disk selection (the installer only supports full-disk installs: the entire target disk is partitioned and wiped, no dual/multi-boot)
- Hostname, keyboard layout, system language, and timezone
- User account and password
- An optional SSH toggle
- Optional software profiles
- A review screen before anything is written to disk
Running it without installing
The installer runs the same way on an ordinary dev machine as it does on the live ISO, which is what makes iterating on it possible without a VM or spare disk:
python3 installer/tui/__main__.py --dry-runor, with no setup at all, via uv:
uv run installer/tui/__main__.py --dry-run--dry-run walks every prompt and generates the resulting archinstall configuration, but the review screen only offers saving it, never installing. Without the flag, "Install now" is also offered, but only when running as root, since partitioning a real disk needs it. Either way, "Save configuration" writes base.json and credentials.json to --output-dir (default: /root/sobarch-install as root, ./sobarch-install-output otherwise) so you can inspect the generated config.