Lately, I seem to be spending a lot of time using Raspberry Pis; they form the basis of many of my side projects, and also serve as convenient, light-weight servers.

Setting them up can be a little fiddly, and I often refer back to my post on the topic which contains instructions for—amongst other things—enabling WiFi and SSH by adding a couple of files to the boot partition. Always keen to optimize, I took things one step further and wrote a small interactive script (creatively called configure-raspberry-pi) to set up the basics. You can find it on GitHub.

While setting up this script and looking for ways to configure additional things like the hostname, I came across PiBakery which is focused on enabling large-scale Raspberry Pi deployments1. It’s more than I need, but could be useful if you need to do more complex things.

  1. I also discovered LICEcap which was great for capturing the screen recording. ↩