See Schlomos Blog for more details about this project.
If you have a lot of devices and need to provision the SD cards for them then you don't want any manual configuration, you want a fully automated solution. We use DEB packages to customize our systems. PCs and Laptops get installed with the help of a preseed file. Since Raspberry Pis don't do PXE boot this project is our replacement of preseed for Raspian.
Automatically download Raspbian and create a customized image:
- Copies your SSH keys into root account and disables SSH password-based logins
- Removes Raspian first-run stuff so that the first boot of the device will be production ready
- Adds additional DEB repos and GPG keys
- Installs additional DEB packages
- Installs auto-upgrade cron job
This script does not simply copy a binary image file onto the SD card. Instead it modifies the Raspbian image in a chroot environment, partitions and formats the SD card with the required file systems and then copies the files to the SD card. As a result the file systems on the SD card always fill it up completely, without resizing.
- Clone/Checkout this project
- Install required dependencies:
- Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install kpartx qemu-user-static
- Ubuntu:
- Insert an SD card
- Find out the block device of the SD card in
/proc/partitions, e.g./dev/mmcblk0 - Run script:
rpi-image-creator /dev/mmcblk0.
- Dry-run script with
rpi-image-create --chroot. This does everything except writing to an SD card. Instead it will put you into a chroot in the created image. Note: When you exit the chroot shell the chroot area is removed.