treehouse-builder

Treehouse-builder is based on Raspbian and allows the user to develop and tailor their own custom RPi images. The script will modify the latest Raspian image by installing packages, purging packages and executing custom commands, and then finally creates a bootable .img file that can be burned to the microSD card.

Instructions

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

System requirements:

Operating System - Debian/Ubuntu
microSD card reader
class10 microSD card (minimum 8 Gb)
Packages - kpartx wget gpg parted qemu-arm-static

Note:

To install the required packages, run the following command in Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install kpartx wget gpg parted qemu-arm-static.

For other operating systems like MacOS or Windows, check out ole--vagrant-treehouses

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/ole-vi/treehouse-builder.git
cd treehouse-builder
./treehouse-builder --chroot

You should be in a chrooted environment when it is completed. You can access the RPi images' files and folders or carry on with any extra modifications. To exit the chrooted environment just type exit and then you should be back in your own shell again. The image in this stage is now ready to write to the microSD card.

Add gpg key

sudo bash -c 'wget -O - https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key | apt-key add -'

Customize

INSTALL_PACKAGES - Install packages found in the APT repositories. 
To add a custom package not found in the default APT repositories: 
add the package name into INSTALL_PACKAGES and then add the custom repository to ADD_REPOS.

PURGE_PACKAGES - Remove packages already installed on the default Raspbian image.

CUSTOM_COMMANDS - Add extra commands to execute upon the completion of the treehouse-builder, 
which is run under a chroot environment. For instance to enable ssh on boot for the RPi, 
the command sudo touch /boot/ssh is included in CUSTOM_COMMANDS. The semi-colon is there to 
separate the commands and will execute regardless whether or not the previous command is successful.

Retrieve builds

After exiting from the chroot environment, successful builds are found in the treehouse-builder/images directory. There should be a few files in that directory. The .zip file is the unmodified base image, which is downloaded by the script when executed. The .img file is the new customized image and is now ready to be burned onto the microSD card.

To remove unwanted modifications otherwise:

bash clean.sh

Write to microSD Card

There are many different ways to write to the microSD card. An easy approach is to download Etcher and run the program. It supports multiple Operating Systems such as Linux, OSX and Windows, and has a pretty simple GUI, where you select the location of the .img file, the destination of the microSD card and then press the flash button to write the image onto the microSD card. Remember that it will delete everything on that drive so make sure it is the correct drive!

Release

This project use Travis CI to automatically build and upload new treehouse image to dev.ole.org. .travis.yml configuration file tells Travis CI to run the deployment script at deploy/deploy.sh if a tag is applied to the commit.

New image's name will be treehouse- followed by whatever is after release- in the tag
New image's SHA-1 checksum will be calculated and uploaded as <image_name>.img.gz.sha1
If the tag is formated like release- followed by only numbers, latest.img.gz and latest.img.gz.sha1 would be a symbolic link of the newly uploaded image and its SHA-1 checksum
At this time, both stable.img.gz and branch.img.gz on dev.ole.org are manually linked to their specific image

Relevant Links

Raspberry Pi project page on github.io

Built with

rpi-image-creator

======= copy successful builds from images directory and use bash clean.sh to remove otherwise

ole-vi / treehouse-builder