RPi Debian Builder

Build your custom Debian image for RaspberryPi easily.

Requirements

This tool runs under linux and needs some system requirements. Because it needs to be run as root (for the chroot purspose) it is highly recommended to run it inside a virtual machine.

Quickstart

The easiest way to run it is to use Vagrant to create a fresh VM, install requirements and then run the image build.

from the project directory

vagrant up
vagrant ssh
sudo su
cd /vagrant

Now you are inside the VM as root in the project directory, ready to run the image build. To do so, you can do it without any customization running the command

./rpi-debian-builder --config config.json --modules basic

It uses the basic module which perform some elementary configuration. It is recommended to always use it unless you really know what you are doing.

Modules

A module is a directory containing

static files to deploy to the target filesystem
templates to generate files to the target filesystem
provisioning scripts

Module directory structure

modules
   |-- module1
   |     |-- initialize
   |     |     |-- files
   |     |     |-- templates
   |     |     |-- scripts
   |     |
   |     |-- provision
   |     |     |-- files
   |     |     |-- templates
   |     |     |-- scripts
   |     |
   |     |-- finish
   |           |-- files
   |           |-- templates
   |           |-- scripts
   |
   |-- module2
   |     |-- ...

Module phases:

initialize - This phase runs before any other provisioning. It runs outside the chroot context
provision - This phase runs after built-in provisioning. It runs in a chroot context
finish - This phase runs after the provision one. It runs in a chroot context

In any phase, files and templates are always relative to the root of the filesystem of the target operating system.

Use your own modules

To use your own module, just copy it in the modules directory and make reference to it on the command line when you run the rpi-debian-builder command. You can reference as many module as you want (comma separated).

License

Everything in this repository is published under the MIT license.