effortlessly boot, configure, update and monitor your raspberry pi
APACHE-2.0 License
A lot of Raspberry Pi projects treat their software as pets. A lot of time is put into configuring and tweaking the setup. If the hardware dies or the SD card wears out it can be very challenging or time consuming to rebuild/replicate the software setup. Normally this is fine for a single DIY and/or educational project. But it's hardly practical or scalable in other cases. Our goal is to automate both the initial setup and the update process for multiple Raspberry Pi nodes. We want to turn your pet project into a cattle project.
What does this mean? Several things:
To quickly get going, you can use a prebuilt initfs image that you can find here (cattlepi.zip download). This image uses the following API endpoint: https://api.cattlepi.com and the following API key: deadbeef
You can write the image to an empty SDCard using etcher: https://etcher.io/ Several guides on etcher are available, including https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/ and https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/pi-sd-etcher/. The only thing that is different is that instead of using the raspbian downloaded image you will use the cattlepi image.
Insert the card into the RPi and watch it boot. On first boot the loader will update the images and will boot the default configured image (usually the latest raspbian + any package updates) You can learn more details about the API itself or how to get your own API key at https://cattlepi.com
Using the builder in this project you can create and use two images: an initfs image and a rootfs image. The (initfs) is written on the an SD card boot partition. This image contains code to both self-update and to download the final root file system (rootfs) used by the RPi. The boot code communicates with with an external API endpoint, to retrieve the configuration associated with your RPi, as well as to figure out where the image files are located and download them (i.e. both the boot image and the rootfs image can freely change between boots). As an optimization, the images are cached on the SD card boot partition to make subsequent boots faster (and to avoid any unnecessary network traffic).
This repository provides the tooling and wiring needed to build/generate the images used to boot and the root file system.
To build and test images locally, follow this guide A little more detail on the boot process can be found here Also please look at the FAQ associated with this project
The following software is used in the project:
Email: hello at cattlepi dot com Twitter: @cattlepi Reddit: /u/cattlepi
If you would like to receive update on the CattlePi project we also have a low volume, interesting stuff, mailing list: Subscribe here
The project documentation companion can be found at https://cattlepi.com/ Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation