crownos-iso

Everything that turns the CrownOS source repositories into an installable system: desktop packages for each base distribution, the signed repository they are installed from, and the live ISO that runs the installer.

The user picks the base — Arch, Debian 13, Ubuntu 26.04, Fedora 44 or NixOS 26.05 — on the installer's Where should CrownOS go? page, or the Windows installer's oobe.json names it (install.distro). The live image is Arch in every case; it carries each base's bootstrapper and installs the chosen one onto the disk, then adds crownos-desktop from the CrownOS repository.

Layout

build.sh                 build packages, sign the repository, stage the installer, build the ISO
live/                    the archiso profile (profiledef.sh, packages.x86_64, airootfs/, boot loaders)
packaging/
  components.list        one line per package: repo, cargo package, installed files
  crownos-desktop/       session files carried by the crownos-desktop meta-package
  depends/<distro>.list  runtime services and dlopen()ed libraries the meta-package pulls in
  containers/            one build environment per package format
  scripts/               build-packages.sh and index-repo.sh, run inside those containers
  nix/                   flake with the packages and the services.crownos NixOS module

This repository expects the component repositories next to it, as in a checkout of the whole of CrownOS: ../crownpositor, ../crownshell, ../vendor and so on.

Building

./build.sh packages              # all bases, or name some: ./build.sh packages arch fedora
./build.sh repo                  # needs the signing key (CROWNOS_SIGNING_KEY)
./build.sh installer
sudo ./build.sh iso

Packages are built in podman or docker containers of the base they are for, because the components link its ffmpeg, pipewire and Mesa. Their library dependencies are read off the built binaries, not maintained by hand.

build/repo is the tree to publish at https://repo.crownos.org (crownos-installer/src/engine/distro/mod.rs, REPO_URL). Signing happens on the host with your own gpg; no secret key enters a container.

NixOS is built from source by packaging/nix, which every NixOS install references as github:Crown-OS/crownos-iso?dir=packaging/nix. It needs each component, crownos-protocols, ffsp-protocol and vendor published under github.com/Crown-OS.

CI/CD

.github/workflows/build.yml runs on pull requests, pushes to main, v* tags, every night at 03:00 UTC, and on component-updated dispatches:

Job	Does	Runs on PRs
lint	shellcheck, Nix parse, picks the run's package version	yes
installer	builds crownos-installer	yes
packages	builds all four bases in parallel	yes
repo	signs the repository	no
deploy-repo	publishes it to GitHub Pages	no
iso	builds the ISO in a privileged Arch container	no
release	attaches the ISO and its checksum to a GitHub release	v* tags only

packaging/sources.list names the repositories CI clones next to this one; each run records the revisions it built in sources.txt, published at the root of the repository site.

One-time setup on Crown-OS/crownos-iso:

1. Settings → Pages: source GitHub Actions, custom domain repo.crownos.org (a CNAME record for repo.crownos.org pointing at crown-os.github.io).
2. Secrets:
   • CROWNOS_SIGNING_KEY_ASC: gpg --armor --export-secret-subkeys packages@crownos.org, from a signing subkey without a passphrase.
   • CROWNOS_SOURCES_TOKEN: only if component repositories are private; a fine-grained token with Contents: read on them.

To rebuild when a component changes rather than nightly, give the component repository a CROWNOS_ISO_DISPATCH_TOKEN secret (fine-grained, Contents: read and write on crownos-iso) and add the notify-iso job from crownos-installer/.github/workflows/ci.yml.