I’m glad you posted this again. I remembered you posting this a week or two ago, but when I got a chance to look into it I couldn’t remember which article or what the name of the project was. I’m a fan of the style of NixOS, and also a fan of Arch, so this is a must-try. Thanks!

I just automated my laptop setup with Salt [1]. I want to keep using that instead of bash scripts (what Darch uses, by the looks of it).

I like the idea of having "images" with tempfs overlay. Is it possible to combine Salt with the image feature from Darch?

[1]: https://github.com/atmoz/workstation-formula

I'm not familiar with Salt, but it looks interesting!

Does Salt allow you to run from an already-built (but minimal) Arch installation? The base Darch images (godarch/arch) is bootstrapped manually.

Would I have to create a godarch/arch-salt image that is bootstrapped from salt files, so that you could further salt the image?

How would salt handle the inheritance that Docker provides?

Yes, have a look at how I bootstrap an Arch installation: https://github.com/atmoz/workstation-formula/blob/master/boo...

All you have to do is install Salt, and then you can run salt-call to apply states.

Yes, Salt states can depend on other states, and you could choose to apply only selected states.

By the sounds of it, you could do this currently.

1) Create a root image for your use that installs Salt in your Arch image. See here: https://github.com/pauldotknopf/darch-recipes/blob/master/ba...

2) For the rest of your recipes/layers, create a script/bash file like you would normally, but just pass execution to Salt.

I'll look into Salt more. Maybe there is a way to extend Darch to support different "executors" to support things like bash/Salt/Puppet/etc.

This is cool!