OctoPi

Guy Sheffer maintains “OctoPi”, a Raspbian 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
• CuraEngine 15.04 for slicing directly on your Raspberry Pi

Recommended hardware: Raspberry Pi 3.

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

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

or simply buy one of the available

Getting Started with OctoPi

Please follow these steps after downloading

1. Unzip the image and install the contained .img file to an SD card like any other Raspberry Pi image.

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”. Change the password using the passwd command. You do not need to expand the filesystem, current versions of OctoPi do this automatically.
5. Access OctoPrint through http://octopi.local or http://<your pi's ip address>. https is available too, with a self-signed certificate.

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.

Installing from source

The generic setup instructions boil down to

1. Installing Python 2.7 including pip and virtualenv.
2. Obtaining the source through either of:
   1. cloning the source repository: git clone https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint.git
   2. downloading an archive of the current stable version from Github and unpacking it
3. Creating a (user owned) virtual environment in the source folder: virtualenv venv
4. Installing OctoPrint into that virtual environment: ./venv/bin/python setup.py install
5. OctoPrint may then be started through ./venv/bin/octoprint or with an absolute path /path/to/OctoPrint/venv/bin/octoprint

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 wiki. 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 wiki.