rpiup - Raspberry Pi OS Setup

Install

pip install rpiup

Usage

Initializing an application

This is one time setup that you should only need to run once for each application.

download the latest Raspberry OS (firstboot)

The OS is from https://github.com/nmcclain/raspberian-firstboot This is a modified RPi OS where the only change is that it lets you run a script on first boot.

rpiup os download

Initialize your application files

This creates a directory and copies the default files into it. If ./sd is omitted, it will use the current directory (./).

The files in this directory will all be copied into the raspberry pi boot directory after it is flashed.

rpiup init ./myapp
# whats the app name? ...
# What should the device username be? ...
# What should the device password be? ...
# Do you want to set a git username?
# Do you want to set a git password?
# what's your wifi?: ...
# Do you have a set of alternate wifi credentials you would like to add?
# any app variables you want to set? (press enter to skip) ...
# all set!
cd myapp
ls *
# firstboot.sh
#
# resources:
# aps.yml docker services setup.sh vars.sh

Install Balena Etcher

This is an application that will flash your OS image onto your SD card. You can find it here.

Device Specific Setup

Repeat for each device you want to setup.

Flash your SD Card

• Insert your SD card
• Open Etcher and flash the downloaded os image (should be in the directory above myapp/)

Copy files over and finish device specific configuration

rpi sd setup
# by default, the hostname will be <APP_NAME>-<ETH0_MAC_ADDR>
# but you can set a custom hostname
rpi sd setup --hostname mytestpi

Alternatives

If you're doing a large batch of devices, it can make sense to generate the hostnames before and print out a list of labels to put on the devices. To do that:

### Run once - generate the hostname list and save it to a tsv file:
# pip install randomname
randomname saved --name myapp -g myapp,uuid/8 -n 100 --overwrite

randomname saved --name myapp export > hostnames.tsv

### Run for each device:
# increment the index at the end of the line
rpi sd setup --hostname $(randomname saved --name myapp get 0)
# increment from 0 to 1
rpi sd setup --hostname $(randomname saved --name myapp get 1)
# and so on...

What it can do:

• set the device hostname
• set wifi networks
• set arbitrary variables that can be accessed from the device.
• run arbitrary commands

CLI

Set the hostname

rpiup vars set --hostname blah-091091eh901eh
# or
pip install randomname
rpiup vars set --hostname $(randomname get)

Setting arbitrary environment variables

rpiup vars set --some-feature 1 --myapp_something blah

Set wifi networks

rpiup wifi add MySSID-2G
# enter password:

# or
rpiup wifi add MySSID-2G mypassword