Installing Arch without pacstrap is easy. No, you won't use archbootstrap. That is only for chroots. Instead, you will do it hand made.
First, make the file system.
mkdir -m 0755 -p /path/to/root/var/{cache/pacman/pkg,lib/pacman,log} /path/to/root/{dev,run,etc/pacman.d}
mkdir -m 1777 -p /path/to/root/tmp
mkdir -m 0555 -p /path/to/root/{sys,proc}
cp -a /etc/pacman.d/gnupg "/path/to/root/etc/pacman.d/"
Then, use the following advantages. I prefer advantage 1.
This can only be used on Arch based systems. For others, go to advantage 2.
Execute this command:
unshare --fork --pid pacman -r "/path/to/root" -Sy packages
where packages is replaced with base. Add linux and linux-firmware if you're installing Arch, and add more packages for personalised use.
Do NOT try this, use advantage 1 instead! However, considering you know what you're doing...
Make sure you have tar (with xz and zstd just in case) and either wget, curl, or a browser with support for downloads.
- Download the packages base, it's depends, and your own packages from any Arch mirror, or go to packages.archlinux.org. On an Arch Linux system, you can just copy from /var/cache/pacman.
- Execute this:
cd /path/to/root
tar xpvf *.pkg.tar.*
Advantage 1 is out of date?