Story: Script for initializing GIT on Raspberry Pi

 When we need new software on our Raspberry Pi, we create a new image containing that software.

However, the image doesn’t contain the required GIT configuration to access our code for the Raspberry Pi as stored on GitHub, because we want each team member to use his own account for committing changes.

Although configuring GIT manually is not a huge task, it is a repeating task...

So, we created a script that:

• Configures GIT on the Raspberry Pi with settings used on the Windows computer.
• git user name and email
• Generates an ssh-key on the Raspberry Pi and adds the public key to the GitHub account used on the Windows computer.
• Clones the GitHub repository with our code for the Raspberry Pi to the Raspberry Pi.

Some preparation on the Raspberry Pi

The installation of the packages ‘expect’ and ‘pwgen’ on the Raspberry Pi is done as part of our image generation.

Preparation Windows development workstation

On the Windows development station is quite some preparation required, because you need passwordless ssh access to your GitHub repositories and passwordless GitHub CLI.

Disclaimer

It sounds better than it is at this moment, because sometimes the script hangs or fails for unknown reasons. However, in general it just works and takes care of configuring git on the Raspberry Pi and making our repository available in less than 20 seconds, with one command. If it takes more time, we just stop the PowerShell script with CTRL-C and rerun.

Improving this will probably not reach the top of our priority list until after Pi Wars 2024.

Resources 

The code we use	https://github.com/Dutch-Rescue-Team/rpi-init-github
GitHub CLI home page	https://cli.github.com/