As soon as I heard about the Raspberry Pi 3, I knew I wanted one. The onboard Bluetooth and WiFi, more powerful processor, and maturity of the maker culture around the Pi tipped me over the edge. Once I got it in hand, I had to lay a good foundation on which I could build my little projects. As someone who works on server automation, I need to do a little more laying that foundation than most would consider necessary. I also need to have Docker installed. With Docker, I get a simple way to experiment and blow everything away if things go badly.
This repository assumes the use of OS X, but converting should be easy.
Before I could do anything, I needed to get an SD card with Raspbian Lite on it.
I took a new 16GB card and formatted it to FAT32.
To do this, I used SDFormatter (brew cask install sdformatter) to overwrite the whole thing.
Most of the time, I would choose a command line option, but this is just too easy.
Once the card was formatted, I ran ./flash https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest.
With everything ready to go, I plugged everything in and booted it up.
The default hostname is raspberrypi so after a brief wait, it's ready to accept SSH connections.
The user is pi and the password is raspberry.
This worked for SSH, but not with my automation tool of choice, Ansible.
To get the real IP address, I could probably log in to my router, but I chose to use the more general solution, nmap.
nmap -p 22 192.168.0.0/24
To install all the tools I want and configure them, I always choose Ansible for its operational simplicity.
For the Pi, I had to break down the playbooks into two runs.
The first playbook ensures the default user has the right SSH key, kernal modules, and WiFi configuration.
Next, I needed to SSH in to manually run raspi-config to resize the filesystem and set the locale.
I might investigate removing this step in the future, but having to run this terminal UI isn't that big of a deal since I only have one of these things.
Finally, I can install all the goodies I want, including Docker.
ansible-playbook --ask-pass playbooks/new_server.yml
ssh [email protected]
sudo raspi-config
sudo shutdown -r
ansible-playbook playbooks/site.yml
Much of my inspiration and the flash script came from the Hypriot blog.
I couldn't have gotten to this state as easily without their effort.