raspberry-make

raspberry-make is a command-line tool (Makefile) that can be used to build deterministic and ready-to-use OS images for the Raspberry Pi, defined by a set of configuration files. It is intended for creating images with pre-installed software and configuration, that can be deployed to headless computers, without the need for setup procedures or manual installations.

A provisioning-based approach, like the one made possible by this tool, leads to a decrease in deployment time, to a decrease in human-related errors, and allows to collect all the configuration files related to a specific machine in a single repository.

Features:

• all build stages are cached and therefore reprocessed only if needed
• compatible with multiple Linux distros, as it depends only on docker
• building happens in an isolated docker container
• building does not require root privileges, nor any additional capability

raspberry-make is implemented in the form of a Makefile, and makes use of Ansible, a common tool for configuring remote machines, that follows rules defined in YAML-formatted files.

Installation and usage

1. Install dependencies:

   • docker (>= 18.09)
   • make
   • curl

2. Download software and sample configuration:

   curl -L https://github.com/gswly/raspberry-make/tarball/master | tar zxvf - --strip-components=1
   rm README.md LICENSE
   

3. Edit config to suit your needs, edit 00base/playbook.yml, 01apt/playbook.yml, 02ssh/playbook.yml to suit your needs. These files are Ansible playbooks, whose format is documented here. It is possible to create as many folders as needed, each with a file named playbook.yml. Folders are processed in alphabetical order, and rules are processed sequentially.

4. Launch:

   make -f rpimake.mk
   

   the resulting image will be available in build/output.img.

Upgrade

Upgrade raspberry-make to the latest version:

make -f rpimake.mk self-update

Limitations

Some files cannot be changed by playbooks since they are used by Docker; these are:

• /etc/hosts
• /etc/hostname
• /etc/mtab
• /etc/resolv.conf

File config contains options to change these files safely.

Links

main image builder

• https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

other Raspbian-based provisioning systems

• https://github.com/davidferguson/pibakery
• https://github.com/Scout24/rpi-image-creator

other non Raspbian-based provisioning systems

• https://buildroot.uclibc.org/
• https://www.yoctoproject.org/

inspired by

• https://github.com/plerup/makeEspArduino