Raspberry Pi Headless Setup

My process for setting up a Rasberry Pi 3B+ without an attached keyboard, monitor or GUI. Uses Raspbian Buster Lite.

• Command line script for bootstrapping a working system
  • burning an OS image
  • setting up WiFi
  • setting up key-based SSH authentication
• Ansible Playbooks for provisioning software
  • PostgreSQL
  • TimescaleDB
  • Python
  • Example application (photoresistor)

For a description of the circuit see my previous blog post

Bootstrapping

Fetch the latest image

wget -O rasbian_lite_latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest && \
  unzip rasbian_lite_latest.zip && \
  rm rasbian_lite_latest.zip

You should have a file named something like 2019-07-10-raspbian-buster-lite.img

Insert the SD card

diskutil list

Find the disk name for the SD Card, in my case disk2

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2
LATEST=2019-07-10-raspbian-buster-lite.img
sudo dd bs=1m if=$LATEST of=/dev/rdisk2 conv=sync

Wait for it to mount then

cd /Volumes/boot/

# Enable ssh
touch ssh

# Install the wifi credentials
cat << EOF > wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=US

network={
    ssid="ssid"
    psk="password"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
EOF

Unmount the disk, insert the SD Card into the Pi and turn it on.

After a minute or two, you should be able to log into your wifi router's administration interface and find the DHCP-assigned IP address for your Pi.

ssh pi@192.168.1.144
passwd  # default pass is "raspberry", enter a new pass twice
exit

Then copy your ssh creds and confirm that key-based auth works (ie no password prompt)

ssh-copy-id pi@192.168.1.144
ssh pi@192.168.1.144
exit

That should be the last time you need to manually ssh into the Pi.

Provisioning

Get ansible, use a virtualenv

pip install -U ansible

Make a hosts file, editing the IP address accordingly

[pi]
192.168.1.144 ansible_user=pi

Run the playbook

ansible-playbook -i hosts pi.yml