raspberrypi-headless-setup

Use Packer for ARM to build base images & deploy images with personalized cloud-init config on flash.

This repository should serve as an example of file structure and scripts that you can use for your own projects. This combines a few different techniques for headless setup of raspberry pis - running the make commands should generate valid images with no modifications to this project and provide a great starting point for adding some DevOps to your homelab.

My Projects

base - Adds my wpa_supplicant, configures locale, installs vim, git, and other common helpful tools. A nice clean slate preconfigured with WiFi connectivity if I can't run ethernet to that Pi. I target the output of this image as the iso input to other projects to save time from the initial installs and updates.

Usage

The filepaths under the files directory represent the ultimate destination directory structure, ie files/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg is expected to be on the pi at /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.

Packer scripts and general bash commands for configuring the machines are in the packer directory.

To save time while developing new images, my personal workflow is to build the base image and then build on top of that, sort of like docker layers. Each time the base is updated, I will need to update the sha hash in downstream projects otherwise it will reuse the old image in packer_cache directory.

Dependencies

This project uses the following dependencies:

• Docker for Mac >= 2.3.2.0 (currently in edge)
• packer-build-arm-image in this repo I use the public docker image, but you can checkout this repo if you need to customize the build environment and build a custom docker image
• flash command to add in cloud-init at time of flash

Personalize

Clone and modify the files below to personalize your setup. All non-example files are gitignored, but make sure to at least create these files to avoid packer errors.

Set up your public SSH key for passwordless entry:

cp files/boot/user-data.example.yaml files/boot/user-data.yaml

Set up WiFi connections:

cp files/boot/wpa_supplicant.example.conf files/boot/wpa_supplicant.conf

You can also set the hostname while flashing, view the Makefile flash commands for more info.

Building

• make img-base to build the base image.
• make flash-base to flash the built base image.
• make all to build + flash.