Run Docker on a Raspberry Pi 3 with onboard WiFi

Sat, Mar 5, 2016

Today morning we finally got our Raspberry Pi 3’s from ThePiHut. They have been overwhelmed by the number of orders.

ThePiHut delivery

While waiting for the delivery we already heard from our community that the current HypriotOS SD image does not boot.

But with some little tweaks the first people have started running Docker containers with HypriotOS. We will update our image builder soon and publish a new HypriotOS image for an easy out-of-the-box experience.

In the meantime for all the impatient out there I’ll give you a short intro how to run the latest Docker Engine on the standard Raspbian SD image.

Download Raspbian LITE

Just download and flash the Raspbian LITE image from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ or use our flash script with this command.

flash https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest

Now boot your Raspberry Pi 3 and log into it with user pi and the password raspberry.

ssh [email protected]

The standard Raspbian image does not resize the SD filesystem automatically.

Add the overlay kernel module

Before we resize and reboot the Pi we also customize a little bit. The overlay kernel module must be loaded automatically while booting, so we just add it with the next command.

echo "overlay" | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Customize WiFi

If you want to run your Docker with the onboard WiFi, just add your SSID and pre-shared key with the next command

echo 'network={
  ssid="your-ssid"
  psk="your-psk"
}' | sudo tee -a /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Resize filesystem

Now we have to resize the filesystem to install Docker and have space for Docker images and containers. Start raspi-config and follow the steps to resize your filesystem.

sudo raspi-config

After that let raspi-config reboot your Raspberry Pi.

Cut the wires

If you have added your WiFi settings, remove your network cable while rebooting. From now on you can connect to your Raspberry Pi 3 over the air.

Install Docker

After rebooting, eventually unplugging the network cable we have to install Docker. The Raspbian Jessie distribution also has a Docker package, but it is only Version 1.3.3. So we install the Hypriot’s Docker 1.10.2 instead.

Just log into your Raspberry Pi 3 again and install Docker with these commands.

ssh [email protected]
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https
wget -q https://packagecloud.io/gpg.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
echo 'deb https://packagecloud.io/Hypriot/Schatzkiste/debian/ wheezy main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hypriot.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y docker-hypriot
sudo systemctl enable docker

Now you have a good setup until the next HypriotOS release is coming.

docker version