MidnightBSD Builder

April 17, 2026 · View on GitHub

This project builds the MidnightBSD VM image for the cross-platform-actions/action GitHub action. The image contains a standard MidnightBSD installation. It will install the following packages:

bash
curl
rsync
sudo

Except for the root user, there's one additional user, runner, which is the user that will be running the commands in the GitHub action. This user is allowed use sudo without a password.

Architectures and Versions

The following architectures and versions are supported:

Version	x86-64
4.0.4	✓

Building Locally

Prerequisite

Packer 1.15.1 or later
QEMU

Building

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cross-platform-actions/midnightbsd-builder
cd midnightbsd-builder

Run build.sh to build the image:
```
./build.sh <version> <architecture>
```
Where <version> and <architecture> are the any of the versions or architectures available in the above table.

The above command will build the VM image and the resulting disk image will be at the path: output/midnightbsd-4.0.4-x86-64.qcow2.

Additional Information

The qcow2 format is chosen because unused space doesn't take up any space on disk, it's compressible and easily converts the raw format.