Download & Setup OctoPrint
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.
Images
Stable
You can download the latest OctoPi image via the following button.
8a550602b8ccc5df8381924757f88ab9
Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+ or 4B 1/2/4GB strongly recommended, Raspberry Pi Zero/Zero W not officially supported!
Image compatible with Raspberry Pi A, B, A+, B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, 3B+, 4B 1/2/4GB, Zero and Zero W.
Incompatible to Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB. Only 32bit builds available.
Alternatively simply buy one of the available
Release Candidate
The current release candidate for 0.18.0 can be found here:
Image compatible with Raspberry Pi A, B, A+, B+, 2B, 3A+, 3B, 3B+, 4B 1/2/4/8GB, 400, Zero and Zero W.
Nightlies
You can also get the 32bit 0.18 nightlies here or the highly experimental 64bit 0.18 nightlies for the RPi4 8GB here.
Setting up OctoPi
Please follow these steps after downloading:
-
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! -
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 useoctopi-wpa-supplicant.txt
.Please also refer take a look at the full WiFi setup guide in the FAQ that also includes Troubleshooting tips.
-
Boot the Pi from the card.
-
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”. Runsudo raspi-config
. Once that is open:- Change the password via “Change User Password”
- Optionally: Change the configured timezone via “Localization Options” > “Timezone”.
- 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 useTab .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.
-
Access OctoPrint through
http://octopi.local
orhttp://<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
- Installing Python including pip and virtualenv. Please note: While OctoPrint itself supports running under both Python 2.7 and Python 3.6+, it is recommended that you install using Python 3.6+ since Python 2 is now end-of-life. A majority of the plugins are compatible to Python 3 now, full details can be found on the plugin repository
- Creating a virtual environment somewhere:
virtualenv OctoPrint
- Installing OctoPrint into that virtual environment:
OctoPrint/bin/pip install OctoPrint
- 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.