Overview

stone is a CLI for managing Avocado stones. It takes a JSON manifest that describes an OS image — its storage device, partition layout, per-partition images, provisioning profiles, and OTA update strategy — plus a set of build artifacts, and turns them into the concrete outputs that provision and update a device: raw disk images, FAT images, and OS bundles.

Capabilities

• Manifest-driven builds — a single manifest.json is the source of truth for the storage device, partitions, images, provisioning, and update layout.
• Image assembly — builds FAT images (FAT12/16/32) from file lists and full disk images from fwup templates, resolving partition offsets and sizes into the environment fwup expects.
• OS bundles — packages boot/OS artifacts and a generated bundle.json into a compressed .aos archive for OTA and provisioning. The .aos format is consumed on-device by avocadoctl.
• Provisioning — builds the artifacts and runs a per-target provision profile script to flash or image a device, passing partition geometry and device metadata through as environment variables.
• Manifest overlays — deep-merges overlay files onto a base manifest (last wins) so one base can be specialized per target or per environment.

The manifest

Every command operates on a manifest — a JSON document with these top-level sections:

Section	Required	Purpose
runtime	yes	Platform, architecture, update strategy, and the provisioning entry point.
storage_devices	yes	Devices, their partition layout, and the images that fill each partition.
provision	no	Provisioning profiles, their scripts, and the environment they receive.
update	no	How OS artifacts map to A/B slots for OTA, and how a slot is activated.

See Usage for the full manifest field reference and Commands for the command reference.

The pipeline

The commands form a pipeline from manifest to device. Each is independently runnable:

describe-manifest   inspect a manifest (human-readable summary)
validate            check every file the manifest references is present
create              stage all referenced inputs into an output directory
bundle              build images + bundle.json, package into an .aos
provision           build images and run the provision profile against a target

Related tools

• avocadoctl applies the .aos bundles stone produces, using A/B partition switching on-device.
• Provisioning field contract describes the optional provision.fields metadata that lets tooling such as avocado-desktop render input controls for provisioning variables.