OctoPi

Guy Sheffer maintains “OctoPi”, a Raspbian (and thus Debian) based SD card image for the Raspberry Pi that already includes OctoPrint plus everything you need to run it:

• OctoPrint plus its dependencies
• MJPG-Streamer for live viewing of prints and timelapse video creation, compatible with various USB webcams and the Raspberry Pi camera

Recommended hardware: Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+ or 4B. Expect print artifacts and long loading times with other options, especially when adding a webcam or installing third party plugins. Setups not using recommended hardware are not officially supported.

Please note that the Raspberry Pi Zero W is not recommended explicitly since severe performance issues were observed, caused by the WiFi interface when bandwidth is utilized (e.g. the webcam is streamed), negatively impacting printing quality. See also here.

You can download the latest OctoPi image via the following button.

or simply buy one of the available

Setting up OctoPi

Please follow these steps after downloading:

1. Unzip the image and install the contained .img file to an SD card using Etcher. Do not at any point format the SD from your Operating System, even if prompted to do so - that will break it and you’ll have to start over. Just use Etcher to flash the .img file, that is enough!

2. Configure your WiFi connection by editing octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt on the root of the flashed card when using it like a thumb drive. Important: Do not use WordPad (Windows) or TextEdit (MacOS X) for this, those editors are known to mangle the file, making configuration fail. Use something like Notepad++, Atom or VSCode instead or at the very least heed the warnings in the file.

   Note: This changed with OctoPi 0.15.0, earlier versions had you edit octopi-network.txt which has a different format. This old method is no longer supported and the contents of this file will be ignored. Just use octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt.

   Please also refer take a look at the full WiFi setup guide in the FAQ that also includes Troubleshooting tips.

3. Boot the Pi from the card.

4. Log into your Pi via SSH (it is located at octopi.local if your computer supports bonjour or the IP address assigned by your router), default username is “pi”, default password is “raspberry”. Run sudo raspi-config. Once that is open:

   1. Change the password via “Change User Password”
   2. Optionally: Change the configured timezone via “Localization Options” > “Timezone”.
   3. Optionally: Change the hostname via “Network Options” > “Hostname”. Your OctoPi instance will then no longer be reachable under octopi.local but rather the hostname you chose postfixed with .local, so keep that in mind.

   You can navigate in the menus using the arrow keys and Enter. To switch to selecting the buttons at the bottom use Tab.

   You do not need to expand the filesystem, current versions of OctoPi do this automatically.

   You also do not need to manually enable the RaspiCam if you have one, that is already taken care of on the image as well.

5. Access OctoPrint through http://octopi.local or http://<your pi's ip address>. https is available too, with a self-signed certificate (which means your browser will warn you about it being invalid).

Please also refer to OctoPi’s README, especially the “How to use it” section.

Thomas Sanladerer created a great video guide on how to get OctoPi 0.12 up an running.

Further resources

• The MagPi issue #36 contains a “Getting Started” guide on pages 50-51. You can find an excerpt here (MagPi License: CC BY-NC-SA).
• Scripts to build (and customize) the image yourself can be found in OctoPi’s Github repository.
• Nightly builds can be found here.

Installing manually

The generic setup instructions boil down to

1. Installing Python including pip and virtualenv. Please note: While OctoPrint itself supports running under Python 3.7+ starting with version 1.4.0, many of the available plugins still are Python 2 only. If you want to make use of plugins from the plugin repository, you should for now still install OctoPrint under Python 2.7. Note that migrating to Python 3 at a later date is easily done.
2. Creating a virtual environment somewhere: virtualenv OctoPrint
3. Installing OctoPrint into that virtual environment: OctoPrint/bin/pip install OctoPrint
4. OctoPrint may then be started through ./OctoPrint/bin/octoprint serve or with an absolute path /path/to/OctoPrint/bin/octoprint serve

More specific setup instructions for the most common runtime environments can be found below.

Linux

For installing OctoPrint from source, please take a look at the setup instructions for Raspbian on the forum. They should be pretty much identical on other Linux distributions.

Windows

For installing the OctoPrint server on a Windows system, please take a look at the setup instructions for Windows on the forum.

Mac

For installing the OctoPrint server on a Mac, please take a look at the setup instructions for MacOS on the forum.