pi-gen-extender

This wrapper around the official RPi-Distro/pi-gen repo helps you build a minimal Raspbian image with extra debs installed.

What does this do?

The provisioning script serves this purposes:

1. git clone https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen.git
2. Remove stages 3, 4, & 5 to make a Raspbian-lite image
3. Create a 03-custom-installations sub-stage under stage2
4. Copies the 00-run.sh script into the new subsection

• This is a really handy tool you can use as is for real work
• It installs all the *.deb files in the files dir of the subsection

1. Builds a helloworld.deb file from the helloworld directory in this repo.

• If you are looking for a easy way to install functionality into RaspberryPi/Debian and look like a pro doing it, this is the example you want to follow.

When you first boot your new image and log in as user, pi, you will find that there is a helloworld.sh script in the /usr/local/bin directory. Since it is in your $PATH you can just type hell<tab> and it will auto complete.

What can you do with this?

Once you are able to build an image with helloworld installed, you can do make an image to do anything that a Raspberry Pi is capable of. And best of all, you can do it without having to even boot it.

What's next?

Soon I will get a Pull Request upstream that will allow project owners (or helpful community members) to publish a single script that convert a stock Raspbian image into the desired project. This will replace the countless forum posts full of outdated copy-paste code.

Usage

without Vagrant:

Note:

I have successfully used an AWS EC2 instance with Ubuntu 16.04 to generate the Raspbian image using this method.

git clone https://github.com/RichardBronosky/pi-gen-extender.git
cd pi-gen-extender
source provision.sh
provision
sudo ./build.sh

with Vagrant:

Note:

I have had problems doing this on macOS Sierra, but I'm including how it's intended to work here until I better understand the issue. It could be just my computer, or could be the OS. I've yet to try it on Linux or Windows.

git clone https://github.com/RichardBronosky/pi-gen-extender.git
cd pi-gen-extender
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
cd pi-gen
sudo ./build.sh