Introduction
If you’ve ever used a Raspberry Pi, you’ve probably used the raspi-config configuration tool. This text-based user interface (TUI) is great for changing 99% of basic settings on the Raspberry Pi, such as the hostname, WiFi country, locale, memory split, etc…
However, if you’re managing a fleet of Raspberry Pi devices, or just really like configuration management tools, you’re probably looking for a way to automate setting these items from the command line. I’m not sure how I’ve never come across this, but I just learned that raspi-config has a mostly undocumented non-interactive mode that will do precisely that.
Mostly undocumented
When I say “mostly undocumented”, I’m referring specifically to the non-interactive (nonint) mode of raspi-config. The raspi-config tool itself is documented, and the config.txt file (where a lot of Raspberry Pi settings are saved) is also documented. In fact, the only raspberrypi.org page I could find that referenced nonint was this issue of The MagPi.
The rest of the documentation for the non-interactive mode is from reading code. First was here, in the GTK version of the raspi-config tool. You can see all the commands that start with raspi-config nonint, such as raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country. Second was here, in the raspi-config tool itself. Since raspi-config is just a shell script, this was useful for getting function names, such as get_can_expand() and do_change_locale().
The non-interactive mode is basically split into two modes: get and do. get is for checking current settings, and do is for writing new settings.
Examples
Keep in mind that some of these changes will need a reboot to take effect.
Hostname
- To get the current hostname:
sudo raspi-config nonint get_hostname - To set a new hostname:
sudo raspi-config nonint do_hostname NEW_HOSTNAME
WiFi country
- To get the current WiFi country:
sudo raspi-config nonint get_wifi_country - To set a new WiFi country:
sudo raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country US
Locale
I didn’t see a raspi-config command to get the current locale, but you can just run locale.
- To set a new locale:
sudo raspi-config nonint do_change_locale en_US.UTF-8
Memory split
- To get current GPU memory split:
sudo raspi-config nonint get_config_var gpu_mem /boot/config.txt - To set a new GPU memory split:
sudo raspi-config nonint do_memory_split 256
Wait for network on boot
- To get current network on boot setting:
sudo raspi-config nonint get_boot_wait - To enable waiting for network on boot:
sudo raspi-config nonint do_boot_wait 0
Pi hardware
These commands won’t return any output to the terminal, but exit code 0 means true, exit code 1 means false. Interestingly, I didn’t see a command to check for a Pi 3.
- To see if your device is a Pi 1:
sudo raspi-config nonint is_pione - To see if your device is a Pi 2:
sudo raspi-config nonint is_pitwo - To see if your device is a Pi Zero:
sudo raspi-config nonint is_pizero - To see if your device is a Pi 4:
sudo raspi-config nonint is_pifour
Use cases
If you had a cluster of Raspberry Pi devices and wanted to see the GPU memory split on them, you could use an Ansible playbook or ad-hoc command.
ansible host_or_group_name_here -a "raspi-config nonint get_config_var gpu_mem /boot/config.txt"
Then, if you wanted to change the devices in that cluster to have a minimal memory split, you could use another ad-hoc command (this assumes you have SSH and sudo setup on the target device(s)).
ansible host_or_group_name_here -a "raspi-config nonint do_memory_split 16" --become --ask-become-pass
I’m using this exact setup in my homelab to keep my Pi settings the same across the board.
Conclusion
Because these command are undocumented, I’m guessing they’re unsupported from the command line and could change at any time (see changes to raspi-config here). However, if you’re feeling adventurous and/or want to keep your settings in scripts or configuration management, this might be the option for you.
-Logan
