The goal of this project is to enable you to set up a brand new Raspberry Pi without ever having to connect it to a keyboard, monitor, or ethernet cable, and avoid the following annoying, repetitive tasks:
- setting up a WiFi network
- setting up SSH (including passwordless SSH)
- changing the default username and password
Some people refer to this as a headless setup.
While this is all possible with the Raspberry Pi Imager application, this project provides an automatable command line environment which can be extended with your own customizations.
You provide your wifi credentials, SSH keys and user details, and this project will create an SD card image for you by running a single command line script.
The following prerequisites are assumed:
- You are using a Linux based computer
- You have Docker installed (
sudo apt install docker-ce) - Certain details about your WiFi configuration. See WiFi configuration details
To create an image, first create a file called vars.hcl and fill in your values. You can copy this file from vars.template.hcl.
user: The login username of the pi, e.g. pi
password: The login password of the pi, e.g. raspberry used to be the default.
wifiSsid: The name of your WiFi network
wifiPassword: Your WiFi password.
sshPublicKey: Your ssh public key, usually contained in a file called something similar to ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub. It only takes a few seconds to generate an ssh key, there are many guides online.
However you can skip this step by removing the relevant parts of init-ssh.sh.
Then, simply run sudo ./build.sh and your .img file will be created ready for burning to the SD card.
32 Bit RaspiOS Lite Bookworm. This can be changed in raspios-lite-armhf.pkr.hcl. Tested on Raspberry Pi 3.
The wifi configuration is baked into a file on the Pi in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections. If you look at the template
of this file in init-wifi.sh, you will see that certain assumptions are made about your wifi settings, such as the
security option being "wpa-psk". In case you find it doesn't work because your wifi settings are different, then
simply set up your wifi network manually using the raspi-config tool (or the desktop environment) and when you have a
successful connection, go and look at the file that was created and copy the contents.