Building Armbian

What do I need?

x86/x64/aarch64 machine running any OS; at least 4G RAM, SSD, quad core (recommended),
VirtualBox or similar virtualization software (highly recommended with a minimum of 25GB hard disk space for the virtual disk image)
The officially supported compilation environment is Ubuntu Jammy 22.04.x amd64 only!
binfmt_misc kernel module (some ubuntu-cloud images do not have this module. Switch to a generic kernel if that is the case.)
installed basic system, OpenSSH and Samba (optional)
no spaces in full path to the build script location allowed
superuser rights (configured sudo or root shell).

Not officially supported build environments from community contributions:

Docker environment is also supported for building kernels and full OS images,
Multipass

Please note that system requirements (both hardware and OS/software) may differ depending on the build environment (Docker, Virtualbox, native).

How to start?

Native and VirtualBox environments:

apt-get -y -qq install git  
git clone --depth=1 --branch=main https://github.com/armbian/build  
cd build

Run the script

./compile.sh

Make sure that full path to the build script does not contain spaces.

Providing build configuration

After the first run of compile.sh a new configuration file config-example.conf and symlink config-default.conf will be created. You may edit it to your needs or create different configuration files using it as a template.

Alternatively you can supply options as command line parameters to compile.sh. Example:

./compile.sh BOARD=cubietruck BRANCH=current RELEASE=jammy

Note: Option BUILD_ALL cannot be set to "yes" via command line parameter.
Note: Names for BOARD can be found here by looking at file names. Example: OrangePi 4 = orangepi4.conf = BOARD=orangepi4

Base and descendant configuration

You can create one base configuration (config-base.conf) and use this in descendant config (config-edge.conf). Three parameters (BRANCH, RELEASE, COMPRESS_OUTPUTIMAGE) will be overwritten.

. ./config-base.conf  
  
BRANCH="edge"  
RELEASE="bullseye"  
COMPRESS_OUTPUTIMAGE="sha,gz"

Using GitHub actions

If you do not own the proper equipment to build images on your own, you can try to use our official GitHub action.

Using alternate armbian builder repos and branches

By default, armbian-builder assumes working from main of https://github.com/armbian/build.git. If you are working from your own repo / branch, touch .ignore_changes will cause armbian-builder to not attempt a repo checkout.

Executing any bash statement

Currently, invoking compile.sh will run a monotonous task of building all the components into a final image.

In some situation, especially when developing with Kernel or U-Boot, it is handy to run a portion of that great task like:

        # using default profile  
        ./compile.sh 'fetch_from_repo "$BOOTSOURCE" "$BOOTDIR" "$BOOTBRANCH" "yes"'  
        ./compile.sh 'compile_uboot'

You can also dump the variable:

        # using profile of `userpatches/config-my.conf`  
        ./compile.sh my 'echo $SRC/cache/sources/$BOOTSOURCEDIR'

NOTE: please use single quotes to keep the $VAR from early expansion in the command line shell.

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