Customizing Debian appliance?

[Lombra]

Hi,

I'm trying to build a customized Debian appliance. (container template) I found this article, and managed to build a basic appliance, but the article seems to make a lot of assumptions, and also be rather outdated, with some dead links and links to web archive. How can I actually customize it? For example creating additional users, and installing additional packages.

 

[LnxBil]

Best to use the current template, unpack, chroot into it, change what you want, exit chroot and repack the template under a new name.

 

[Lombra]

Finally had a go at this. Had some success with chroot, but encountered some issues with the tooling. Once I looked up the manual for dab, though, I found I can easily install packages that way without involving chroot.

dab install avahi-daemon