OmarchybotandCodex XHigh
268bac16d3
* Name the install medium when pacstrap rejects a package off it A failed install showed "Omarchy installation stopped", the pacstrap error, a log tail, and a link to Discord. Somewhere in that tail was the whole answer -- pacman rejecting a package as corrupt -- and nothing on the screen connected it to the USB stick it came off. Nothing else can put it there. The offline mirror is bind-mounted onto the target's package cache for the duration of pacstrap, so a package rejected under that path was read straight off the medium; nothing else ever writes there. That is worth saying in the words that name the fix rather than leaving it as a package name nobody recognises. Which way the medium failed is a separate question, and usually unanswerable after the fact: pacstrap runs with --noconfirm, which answers yes to pacman's "delete it?", so the evidence is unlinked through the bind mount before anything can weigh it. The usual verdict therefore names the medium and gives both remedies in the order worth trying -- verify the download first, because it is cheap and rules out the common case. When the package does survive, the sha256 repo-add recorded at build time separates a bad write from a bad read, and the wording follows. Co-Authored-By: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com> * Keep the media diagnosis whole and print it once Two things only visible by looking at the rendered screen. The diagnosis was recorded in the support log before the failure screen was drawn, and the log tail on that screen reads the same file -- so the verdict appeared twice, once as the banner and again eight lines below it. The same finding printed twice reads as two findings. It is recorded after the render now, and the tail carries the installer's own output the way it did before. The package name shared a line with the sentence explaining it, and the screen is only as wide as the logo. npth's name already pushed the mismatch wording past the edge, and a firmware package would have taken the whole sentence with it. Every verdict puts the name on a line of its own, and the test walks all three with a sixty-three character package name to keep them there. Co-Authored-By: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com> * Break the media diagnosis between what happened and what to do The package name and the remedy beneath it ran together as one block, so the line telling someone to verify their download read as another clause about the package rather than the first thing to go and do. A blank line separates them in all three verdicts. The renderer dropped blank lines, on the assumption that any it saw were slack rather than shape, so the break is drawn now instead of skipped. * Give the log tail back the rows the diagnosis spends The tail sizes itself from the terminal height less a constant for everything drawn above it, and the diagnosis is seven rows that constant never knew about. On a forty-row console the failure screen came to forty-one and scrolled its own logo off the top. The tail is the part that should give way, so it is told what was spent above it. The test that came with this first asserted the logo was still on screen, which it cannot: it reads the output stream, and the stream keeps every row ever emitted whether or not it stayed visible. It passed with the fix reverted. It checks the mechanism instead -- a tail that reaches fewer lines of the log when a diagnosis is present -- against two logs identical line for line but for the one path that decides whether there is a diagnosis at all. --------- Co-authored-by: Codex XHigh <codex@openai.com>
Omarchy ISO
The Omarchy ISO is the only supported way to install Omarchy. It ships the Omarchy Configurator, installs Arch Linux, installs the Omarchy packages from the bundled mirror, runs target system setup in the chroot, creates the user, and runs omarchy-setup-user for that user.
Downloading the latest ISO
See the ISO link on omarchy.org.
Every published ISO has a .sha256 beside it at the same URL. Download both into the same directory and check the ISO before writing it to a USB stick:
sha256sum -c omarchy-3.0.iso.sha256
Corruption anywhere in the ISO is worth catching before the write, and corruption in the bundled package mirror is worth catching most: the mirror lives inside the ISO and the installer reads it straight off the medium, so those bytes surface minutes into the install as a pacman "invalid or corrupted package" error rather than as anything that names the download. Corruption elsewhere is louder and earlier — it stops the medium booting or mounting. There is a .sig beside the ISO too for anyone who wants to verify it against the Omarchy signing key.
Creating the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-make; output goes into ./release. By default the ISO uses the Omarchy packages and tracks the quattro branch, from the stable mirror. Pass --edge to use omarchy-dev and omarchy-settings-dev from the edge mirror.
For local development, build the ISO from sibling checkouts:
./bin/omarchy-iso-make --local-source ../omarchy-installer ../omarchy-pkgs
Despite the local folder name, the first argument is the Omarchy source checkout (runtime commands, configs, setup scripts, themes, shell, migrations). The installer itself lives in this ISO repo.
Use --dev or --rc to build against those package channels. Both --dev and --edge select the dev packages from the edge mirror.
Autoinstall
The shipped ISO installs itself with no keyboard when it finds its configuration on a second drive. Attach a drive labeled cidata alongside the ISO and the installer copies the config off it and skips the configurator; with no such drive, nothing changes and the wizard runs as usual. No rebuild, no extra boot entry.
cidata is the cloud-init NoCloud label, so Proxmox, libvirt, and Packer already know how to attach one.
Configuration files
These are the configurator's own output files, so the way to get a starting set is to run one interactive install and copy what it wrote into /root.
| File | Required | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
user_configuration.json |
Yes | archinstall config: disk, hostname, timezone, keyboard |
user_credentials.json |
Yes | Username and password hash |
user_full_name.txt |
No | Git full name |
user_email_address.txt |
No | Git email |
user_encrypt_installation.txt |
No | true when user_configuration.json carries a disk_encryption block; defaults to false |
authorized_keys |
No | SSH public keys in sshd's own format, one per line |
tailscale_authkey |
No | Tailscale auth key; the machine joins your tailnet on first boot |
Both required files must be present or the installer falls back to the configurator. Generate the password hash for user_credentials.json with openssl passwd -6 "yourpassword".
Encryption itself is configured by the disk_encryption block inside user_configuration.json — which carries the passphrase in plaintext, so treat a drive built from an encrypted install accordingly. The flag file must match it: it drives the encrypted install's SDDM autologin and the final boot validation, not the encryption.
authorized_keys is the same file sshd reads — copy your own or write one key per line:
ssh-ed25519 AAAA... you@host
When authorized_keys is present, autoinstall installs it as the user's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, enables sshd, and adds a ufw allow ssh rule — a stock Omarchy install ships openssh with the service disabled and its firewall opens neither port 22 nor anything else beyond LocalSend. Networking needs nothing extra; NetworkManager is already enabled with DHCP. Password SSH authentication is left at the distro default. An authorized_keys with no usable keys fails the install rather than producing a machine nobody can reach.
When tailscale_authkey is present (one key, blank lines and # comments ignored), the install adds the tailscale package from the ISO's bundled mirror — nothing is fetched from the network at install or boot — and stages the join for first boot: the key lands at /etc/tailscale/authkey (root-only), tailscaled is enabled, ufw allows traffic in on tailscale0, and a background unit runs tailscale up once the network is actually up, retrying until it succeeds without holding up the boot. After a successful join the key is deleted and the unit disables itself; until then both survive reboots, so a machine installed offline joins whenever it first gets connectivity. The node appears on the tailnet under the configured hostname. Use a reusable, pre-authorized (tagged) key so one drive image serves many machines — or an ephemeral key for disposable VMs.
Building the drive
mkdir cidata
cp user_configuration.json user_credentials.json authorized_keys cidata/
genisoimage -output cidata.iso -volid cidata -joliet -rock cidata/
Proxmox example
qm create 101 --name my-omarchy \
--bios ovmf --machine q35 --cpu host --cores 4 --memory 8192 \
--ostype l26 --scsihw virtio-scsi-single \
--efidisk0 local-lvm:0,efitype=4m,pre-enrolled-keys=0 \
--scsi0 local-lvm:40,discard=on,iothread=1 \
--net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0 --vga virtio --serial0 socket \
--ide2 local:iso/omarchy.iso,media=cdrom \
--ide3 local:iso/cidata.iso,media=cdrom \
--boot order='scsi0;ide2'
qm start 101
Boot order is disk first: the empty disk falls through to the ISO on the first boot, and the installed system boots from disk afterwards. The machine reboots into Omarchy on its own when the install finishes.
Encrypted autoinstalls are not fully unattended — the LUKS passphrase prompt still needs someone at the first boot.
Testing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-boot [release/omarchy.iso].
Run ./test/all for the fast, VM-free tests under test/unit/, which cover cidata autoinstall loading and the orchestrator's phases without needing a built ISO.
To exercise installation alongside existing Windows-style partitions, run
./bin/omarchy-iso-test-windows-disk [release/omarchy.iso]. It creates a
synthetic disk in /tmp with an existing ESP and data partition plus ample
unallocated space, then offers to start an interactive installation on it. The
fixture exercises Windows partition preservation but does not contain Windows.
Acceptance testing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-test [release/omarchy.iso] to install the ISO into a headless VM by driving the real interactive install flow — the harness reads each screen via QMP screendumps + OCR and answers with virtual keystrokes, so the configurator wizard, install dashboard, reboot prompt, and SDDM login are all exercised exactly as a user would. It then boots the installed system, sends real VM keyboard shortcuts for the primary shell and window-management actions, and runs the in-guest acceptance suite (test/acceptance in the omarchy repo). The suite checks session and service health, the complete core-package manifest, user defaults, representative applications, menus, panels, live weather, launchers, visual selectors, notifications, clipboard, and other interactive shell behavior.
Visual checkpoints are saved as success-<step>.png or failure-<step>.png alongside the serial and install logs in test-runs/<iso>/runs/<timestamp>/. Independent test files and applications continue after a failure so one broken surface does not hide the rest of the report. The harness then stops the VM and opens the ordered screenshots in imv for quick visual review.
The harness syncs the acceptance suite from $OMARCHY_PATH when it is available. The install phase produces a reusable base image, so iterating against another checkout is fast:
./bin/omarchy-iso-test release/omarchy.iso --install-only # once per ISO
./bin/omarchy-iso-test release/omarchy.iso --reuse-base \
--sync-omarchy ../omarchy # fast loop against local tests
Pass --encrypt to drive the encrypted install flow (including typing the LUKS passphrase at boot) instead of the unencrypted one. Pass --no-preview to collect the same visual artifacts without opening them in imv when the run finishes.
Integration testing the ISO
Scenarios under test/integration.d/ boot a real ISO install in QEMU and assert on what the running system actually does. The runner installs the ISO once — unattended, from a generated cidata drive — and saves the result as a reusable base image; every scenario then boots a throwaway overlay of that base with its own copy of the firmware vars, so neither disk nor NVRAM state leaks between runs. Shared machinery (VM lifecycle, QMP screendump + OCR console driving, virtual keystrokes, guest SSH, the cidata build) lives in test/integration.d/base-test.sh, so a new scenario is one file.
./test/integration release/omarchy.iso # install once, run all scenarios
./test/integration release/omarchy.iso --reuse-base # fast loop against the saved base
./test/integration release/omarchy.iso factory-reset # a single named scenario
The first scenario is factory-reset: it proves omarchy-system-factory-reset hands a machine on without destroying a shared ESP. The installed ESP gets a Windows entry with payload plus a second Linux cloned under a foreign machine-id with its own boot directory and UKIs; a real factory reset is then driven through a guest pty, and the harness asserts the foreign entries survive both the staged reset and first-boot provisioning, that the old Omarchy identity is fully retired, and that the machine reaches first-boot setup unattended.
Artifacts — screenshots, the fixtured/staged/final limine.conf, the reset typescript, and the factory-reset log — land under test-runs/<iso>-integration/runs/<timestamp>-<scenario>/, and --no-preview skips the imv review just like the acceptance harness.
Signing the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-sign [release/omarchy.iso]. The signing key is retrieved from the shared Omarchy vault with the 1Password CLI.
Uploading the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-upload [release/omarchy.iso]. This requires rclone configuration (rclone config). The .sig and .sha256 sidecars go up with the ISO when they exist beside it.
Full release of the ISO
Run ./bin/omarchy-iso-release VERSION to create, test, sign, and upload the ISO in one flow. Add --rc to release an RC build instead.