bootstrap-vz is a bootstrapping framework for Debian. It is is specifically targeted at bootstrapping systems for virtualized environments. bootstrap-vz runs without any user intervention and generates ready-to-boot images for a number of virtualization platforms. Its aim is to provide a reproducable bootstrapping process using manifests as well as supporting a high degree of customizability through plugins.

bootstrap-vz was coded from scratch in python once the bash script architecture that was used in the build-debian-cloud bootstrapper reached its limits.

The end-user documentation for bootstrap-vz is available at andsens.github.io/bootstrap-vz. There, you can discover what the dependencies for a specific cloud provider are, see a list of available plugins and learn how you create a manifest.

bootstrap-vz has a master branch for stable releases and a development for, well, development.
After checking out the branch of your choice you can install the python dependencies by running python setup.py install. However, depending on what kind of image you'd like to bootstrap, there are other debian package dependencies as well, at the very least you will need debootstrap.
The documentation explains this in more detail.

Note that bootstrap-vz will tell you which tools it requires when they aren't present (the different packages are mentioned in the error message), so you can simply run bootstrap-vz once to get a list of the packages, install them, and then re-run.

The API documentation, development guidelines and an explanation of bootstrap-vz internals can be found at bootstrap-vz.readthedocs.org.

Contribution guidelines are described on the CONTRIBUTING file. There's also a topic on the documentation regarding the coding style.