Hate to only shill hashi stack but packer if you must. All you need is a container runtime and linux kernel. After that you shouldn't have to think about the core node.
If you're _really_ bare metal - build the base image, boot pxe and run apt update - not much more complicated than that.
If you're _really_ bare metal - build the base image, boot pxe and run apt update - not much more complicated than that.