Installing Salesforce EDA (Education Data Architecture) via Salesforce CLI (sfdx)

Looks like a known issue

Please specify a defaultRecordType in your scratch org definition file

config/project-scratch-def.json

{
    "orgName": "MyCompany",
    "edition": "Developer",
    "objectSettings": {
        "account": {
            "defaultRecordType": "default"
        }
    }
}

Disclosure: I am a member of the Salesforce.org Release Engineering team

The source of truth for how to install and set up any Salesforce.org product is its CumulusCI automation. CumulusCI is a free and open source build orchestration tool on top of Salesforce DX, and is created and maintained by Salesforce.org. The recommended route to build scratch orgs for Salesforce.org products, including EDA, is to use CumulusCI; the process of building a project, such as another managed package, on top of a product like EDA or NPSP is taught in our Trailhead module, Build Applications with CumulusCI.

If you do not wish to use CumulusCI, you can review the product's automation to determine how to compose a sequence of Salesforce DX commands to prepare your scratch org. Because EDA does not have managed package dependencies, this would consist of deploying the contents of EDA's unpackaged/pre directory from its GitHub repository. However, the product's setup automation may change, and we recommend using CumulusCI to consume the automation we define directly.

Disclosure: I am part of the EDA team at Salesforce.

I also formally suggest using CumulusCI to managed installing EDA. It is what we use to spin up our scratch orgs.

EDA has a number of unpackaged dependencies prior to install. The install script utilizes those dependencies to appropriately configure an EDA org and will explicitly fail without some of them.

Please investigate the CumulusCI plan install from a recent pull of the repo to see the steps that the installer currently uses.