Installing Arkdep on a new system

Systemd requirements

/ is partitioned with btrfs.
/boot mounted boot partition.
512MiB boot partition for max 2 deployments, 1GiB recommended.
Systemd-boot bootloader is installed and configured as the primary bootloader.
dracut, wget, curl, gnupg and btrfs-progs are installed.

Image building system requirements

arch-install-scripts and btrfs-progs are installed.

Initializing Arkdep

The following command will initialize Arkdep, it will deploy a subvolume containing all Arkdep related files excluding kernels and initramfs to /arkdep. Kernel and initramfs will instead be stored in /boot/arkdep upon image deployment.

# To init on the current root
sudo arkdep init

# Alternatively to init in to a specific directory
# If the ESP is not mounted underneath $ARKDEP_ROOT/boot, manually define it with ARKDEP_BOOT
sudo ARKDEP_ROOT=/target/dir arkdep init

Prepping the overlay

Once Ardep has been initialized you should prepare the overlay located at /arkdep/overlay. The overlay is copied directly on to the root filesystem of a new deployment, create directories inside of it as-if it were a root filesystem. For example, /arkdep/overlay/etc will be your /etc folder.

You will most likely wish to add the following to the overlay;

passwd, shadow, group, subgid and subuid files containing only entries for root and normal user accounts, system accounts will be supplied via the images and are stored separate in /usr/lib.
fstab file with at least /home, /root and /arkdep mounts configured, see the reference below.
(Optional) A locale.conf/locale.gen, localtime symlink and customized dracut configuration.
(Optional) Customize the default Arkdep configuration at /arkdep/config.

LABEL=arkane_root	/home               btrfs     	rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/home,compress=zstd	0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/root               btrfs     	rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/root,compress=zstd	0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/arkdep             btrfs     	rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep,compress=zstd	                0 1
LABEL=arkane_root	/var/lib/flatpak    btrfs     	rw,relatime,subvol=arkdep/shared/flatpak,compress=zstd	0 1

Kernel parameters

To customize default kernel parameters edit /arkdep/templates/systemd-boot

For distro maintainers

At the top of the arkdep script are defined as variables the defaults for the script. These defaults are used as a fallback and when initializing a new system for Arkdep. As a distro maintainer who is packaging Arkdep for their own project you will likely wish to customize these settings to match your preferences and repository configuration.

You can find a reference pkgbuild file here.