Getting Started v2

Note

This chapter covers the Buildah based workflow v2.

The following setup steps have been tested on Ubuntu 24.04 as well as on Debian bookworm.

Installing edi from the Package Repository

For your convenience, you can directly install edi from a ppa (Ubuntu) or packagecloud (Debian):

Add the edi repository to your setup:

Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:m-luescher/edi-snapshots
sudo apt update

Debian

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/get-edi/debian/script.deb.sh | sudo bash

Install edi:
```
sudo apt install edi
```

Setting up ssh Keys

If you plan to access edi generated target systems using ssh, it is a good idea to create a ssh key pair. Hint: edi versions greater or equal than 0.11.0 have a secure by default setup of ssh and disable password based login.

Review if you already have existing ssh keys:
```
ls -al ~/.ssh
```
Valid public keys are typically named id_rsa.pub, id_dsa.pub, id_ecdsa.pub or id_ed25519.pub.
If there is no valid ssh key pair, generate one:
```
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@example.com"
```
Hint: If you decided to use a passphrase and do not want to reenter it every time, it is a good idea to use a ssh-agent.

Getting Familiar with edi

The best way to get to know the capabilities of edi is to play around with real hardware. If you own a Raspberry Pi you can get started with the edi-pi project configuration. It requires a few additional tools:

sudo apt install buildah containers-storage crun curl distrobox dosfstools e2fsprogs fakeroot genimage git mender-artifact mmdebstrap mtools parted python3-sphinx python3-testinfra podman rsync zerofree

The edi-pi project configuration can be cloned as follows:

mkdir -p ~/edi-workspace/ && cd ~/edi-workspace/
git clone --recursive https://github.com/lueschem/edi-pi.git
cd edi-pi

Optional: In case the device shall connect to a hosted Mender instance, the tenant token (mender_tenant_token) of that instance can be added to the Mender configuration (configuration/mender/mender.yml).

Now a Raspberry Pi 5 OS image can be created (other variants are available too):

edi -v project make pi5.yml

The resulting image can be flashed to a SD card (here /dev/sdb, everything on the SD card will be erased!):

sudo umount /dev/sdb?
sudo dd if=artifacts/pi5.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

Once the Raspberry Pi booted from that SD card, it is accessible using ssh:

ssh pi@IP_ADDRESS