How to change keyboard layout in Alpine Linux

You can easily change the keyboard layout in Alpine Linux by running

setup-keymap

This will first prompt you for your generic keyboard layout:

Available keyboard layouts:
af     ara    ba     bg     by     cm     de     ee     fi     gb     gr     id     in     is     ke     kz     lk     ma     mk     mt     nl     pk     ro     se     sy     tm     ua     vn
al     at     bd     br     ca     cn     dk     epo    fo     ge     hr     ie     iq     it     kg     la     lt     md     ml     my     no     pl     rs     si     th     tr     us
am     az     be     brai   ch     cz     dz     es     fr     gh     hu     il     ir     jp     kr     latam  lv     me     mm     ng     ph     pt     ru     sk     tj     tw     uz
Select keyboard layout: [none]

In my case, I just type de to select the German keyboard layout and press Enter.

After that, It will prompt you for the keyboard variant to use. For German keyboards this will look like this:

Available variants: de-T3 de-deadacute de-deadgraveacute de-deadtilde de-dsb de-dsb_qwertz de-dvorak de-e1 de-e2 de-mac de-mac_nodeadkeys de-neo de-nodeadkeys de-qwerty de-ro de-ro_nodeadkeys de-ru de-sundeadkeys de-tr de-us de
Select variant (or 'abort'):

If you don’t particularly care about the variant or if you don’t know what than means, just enter whatever you entered in the first step: If you entered de before, enter de again and press Enter.

Now Alpine will configure your Keyboard:

* WARNING: you are stopping a boot service
* Caching service dependencies ... [ ok ]
* Setting keymap ... [ ok ]

The new keymap will be effective immediatelyand it will also persist after a reboot.

Note that the Alpine Installer (which you can start using setup-alpine) will automatically ask you for the correct keymap - hence, it’s not neccessary to run setup-keymap before running the installer.