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+, 4B or Zero 2. 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 and Zero W are 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. The Zero 2 however is recommended.

Installing OctoPi

OctoPi is available through the Raspberry Pi Imager, which you can use to download and setup OctoPi. You can install it yourself, or alternatively simply buy one of the available

Here’s how to get started installing OctoPi:

1. If you haven’t already, download and install Raspberry Pi Imager on your computer

2. Find the OctoPi image under ‘Choose OS’, by selecting ‘Other Specific Purpose OS’ followed by ‘OctoPi’ and then the ‘stable’ version.

3. Open advanced options by using the keyboard shortcut ctrl+shift+x to configure your Wifi connection:
   • Set your SSID, password and WiFi country using the options:

4. Install the image to your SD card, then plug everything in to your Raspberry Pi and boot it up. Do not format the SD card after installing, even if prompted to do so. This will break the installation and you will have to start over!

5. 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.

6. 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.

Alternative Wifi Setup

If you aren’t using Raspberry Pi Imager, then you can also setup the Wifi connection using the octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt file on the root of the installed 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.

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

Video

Thomas Sanladerer created a great video guide on how to get OctoPi 0.18 up and running.

Image Downloads

Raspberry Pi Imager will download the latest version of OctoPi for you, but if you want to download the images yourself you can do so here.

Stable OctoPi

OctoPi Nightlies

You can also get the 32bit nightlies here or the highly experimental 64bit nightlies here.

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).
• For customizing OctoPi, take a look at CustoPiZer.
• Scripts to build the image yourself can be found in OctoPi’s Github repository.

Installing manually

The generic setup instructions boil down to

1. Installing Python 3, including pip.
2. Creating a virtual environment somewhere: python -m venv 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 on Linux, 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.