ironic-ipa-downloader

This repository contains scripts to download the Ironic-Python-Agent (IPA) ramdisk images to a shared volume. By default, we pull IPA images from Ironic upstream archive where an image is built on every commit to the master git branch.

How to set env variables for use

To use a stable branch, export the IPA_BRANCH variable when downloading from the default URI.

You can override the default URI with a custom one by exporting the IPA_BASEURI environment variable.

If the archive follows different naming conventions than the default, you can override the file names by specifying the IPA_FILENAME variable.

You can specify the IPA image architecture by exporting the IPA_ARCH environment variable. Doing so will save the image as an architecture specific image.

To have multiple images available for different architectures you should run this container multiple times as multiple initContainers with different configuration and set the IPA_ARCH variable to a different value each time, you will also need to set the IPA_BASEURI and IPA_FLAVOR to point to archives for the correct architecture as default URIs are for x86_64 only.

How to build custom IPA ramdisk image

To build custom IPA ramdisk image, follow the steps below. For more information check the disk-image builder document.

1. Create a virtual environment

   virtualenv myenv
   source myenv/bin/activate

2. Install Ironic Python Agent Builder. Ironic community provides handy utility ironic-python-agent-builder to quickly build ramdisk images, which is using disk-builder under the hood.

   pip3 install ironic-python-agent-builder

3. Build the IPA initramfs and kernel.

   ironic-python-agent-builder --output ironic-python-agent \
     --release 9-stream centos \
     --element='dynamic-login'

   • --release - Distribution release to use.
   • --element - Additional Disk Image Builder(DIB) element to use. List of available elements.
   • output - Output base file name
   • centos - Base distribution.
   • dynamic-login DIB element allows to inject SSH key in the image.

At the end of the process you will have

• ironic-python-agent.initramfs - deploy ramdisk.
• ironic-python-agent.kernel - a binary file containing the kernel.