Wohoo! That was it.
For someone looking for a quick oneliner to add swap:
fallocate -l 2048M /swapfile && chmod 600 /swapfile && mkswap /swapfile && swapon /swapfile
This will create the swapfile and mount it, but will not do so upon next boot as it is not in /etc/fstab
Not only did the installation take much less time, it also actually resulted in a working app 
While trying to figure out the problem, I came across some posts asking about creating a first user, so I’ll dive in there 
Thanks again!