Customizing kickstarts¶

Kickstart snippets¶

Each snippet provides a small unit of functionality within the kickstart. The name and purpose of all defined snippets are given below, along with details of how administrators can selectively override them for particular distros, labs and systems.

The following snippets provide required functionality for Beaker integration, and should never be overridden by the administrator. However, they may be useful when implementing custom templates and snippets:

rhts_pre; rhts_post

Scripts necessary for running a Beaker recipe on the system after it is provisioned. Most of the other snippets listed below are included from one of these snippets rather than directly from the kickstart templates.

beah; harness

Handles installation of the default Beaker test harness (beah), or installation of an alternative harness.

clear_netboot

Instructs the lab controller to remove the current netboot configuration for this system.

grubport

Updates the GRUB configuration if the grubport kickstart metadata variable is set.

install_done

Checks in with the lab controller to indicate that installation is complete (post-installation scripts are now proceeding) and to report the FQDN of the newly installed system.

linkdelay

Handles the linkdelay ks_meta variable.

password

Handles setting the root password for the system.

postinstall_done

Checks in with the lab controller to indicate that post-installation scripts are complete. This snippet defines its own %post section and is placed after all other %post sections.

pre_anamon; post_anamon

Configures anamon, a small daemon which runs during the Anaconda install process and uploads log files to the Beaker scheduler.

rhts_packages

Provides a list of packages to be installed by Anaconda, based on the packages required by and requested in the recipe.

rhts_partitions

Defines the partitions to be created by Anaconda, based on the partition configuration requested in the recipe.

For the following snippets Beaker ships a default template, which should be sufficient in most cases. However, administrators may choose to override these if necessary.

boot_order

On EFI systems, Anaconda adds a new default boot entry that boots from the local disk rather than the network. To ensure Beaker can reprovision the system later, Beaker removes this entry and sets the “BootNext” setting instead. The rhts-reboot command also sets “BootNext” to the entry added by Anaconda rather than booting from the network. See Boot order for more information.

New in version 0.14.4: The boot order adjustment was moved to its own snippet, allowing it to be overridden without replacing the entirety of rhts_post.

install_method

Provides the url or nfs kickstart command which tells Anaconda where to find the distro tree for installation.

lab_env

Sets environment variables on the installed system, giving the address of various services within the lab. The exact name and meaning of the environment variables are left up to the administrator, but may include for example build servers, download servers, or temporary storage servers.

post_s390_reboot

Reportedly this does not work and should probably be deleted.

print_anaconda_repos

Provides the repo kickstart commands which tell Anaconda where to find the distro tree’s Yum repositories for installation. This includes any custom repos passed in the job XML as well, e.g. <repo name="repo_id" url="http://server/path/to/repo"/>

print_repos

Sets up the system’s Yum repo configuration after install.

readahead_sysconfig

Disables readahead, which is known to conflict with auditd in RHEL6.

rhts_devices; rhts_scsi_ethdevices

Provides device commands (if necessary) which tell Anaconda to load additional device modules.

ssh_keys

Adds the Beaker user’s SSH public keys to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys after installation, so that they can log in using SSH key authentication.

timezone

Provides the timezone kickstart command. The default timezone is “America/New_York”. Administrators may wish to customize this on a per-lab basis to match the local timezone of the lab

The following snippets have no default template, and will be empty unless customized by the administrator:

network

Provides extra network configuration parameters for Anaconda.

packages

Can be used to append extra packages to the %packages section of the kickstart.

system; <distro_major_version>

Can be used to insert extra Anaconda commands into the main section of the kickstart.

system_pre; <distro_major_version>_pre

Can be used to insert extra shell commands into the %pre section of the kickstart.

system_post; <distro_major_version>_post

Can be used to insert extra shell commands into the %post section of the kickstart.

network --device eth1 --bootproto dhcp --onboot yes

Writing kickstart templates¶

Kickstart templates and snippets are rendered using the same mechanism as custom kickstart templates from a recipe. Refer to Custom kickstart templates.

Some extra variables are also available to system templates (that is, templates loaded from disk rather than submitted by users):

config¶

The Beaker configuration. Call config.get(name, default=None) to look up values in Beaker’s application-wide configuration.

recipe

The recipe which is being provisioned. If the kickstart is for a system which is being manually provisioned (using the Provision tab on the system page) then this variable will be None.

This object has the following attributes:

id

Database identifier of the recipe.

system¶

The system which is being provisioned. This object has the following attributes:

fqdn

The fully-qualified domain name of the system.

has_efi

True if the system has EFI firmware. Only valid for x86.

owner

A user object representing the system owner.

user¶

A user object representing the job owner. This object has the following attributes:

display_name

Full display name of the job owner.

email_address

Email address of the job owner.

user_name

Username of the job owner.