Installation Guide

On older Raspberry Pi hardware you should give the supervisor processes plenty of time to startup. Once they are fully loaded any excessive CPU usage should drop off.

Supervisord Warning

Pi Portal makes heavy use of supervisord to manage processes.

If you have custom configuration for supervisord you will encounter problems during install and uninstall. Deploying Pi Portal as a docker container is strongly recommended in these types of scenarios.

Docker Container

This is probably the simplest approach, but requires installing docker:

Steps:

  1. Create a configuration file based on your Slack Bot and GPIOs.

  2. Install the container as a service:

    docker run \
  -d \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --device /dev/gpiomem \
  --device /dev/video0 \
  -v ${PWD}/[your_config_file.json]:/config.json \
  ghcr.io/pi-portal/pi-portal:latest

  3. Log into Slack and start interacting with your camera and sensors.

Important Note:

  • Anyone user who is a member of the docker group will have full access to the container!

Raspberry PI OS

The pi_portal Debian packages are also fairly straightforward to install:

Steps:

  1. Identify your CPU architecture

    uname -m

  2. Identify the underlying Debian version of your Raspberry Pi OS install:

    cat /etc/os-release

  3. Visit the pi_portal releases page and download the corresponding Debian package.

  4. Install the Debian package:

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install ./pi_portal-x.x.x-[architecture]-[distribution].deb

  5. Create a configuration file based on your Slack Bot and GPIOs.

  6. Install your configuration file:

    sudo portal install_config [your_config_file.json]

  7. Test your installation:

    sudo portal version

  8. Log into Slack and start interacting with your camera and sensors.

Other Linux Distributions

You’ll need to roll up your sleeves a little bit when installing pi_portal manually, but it’s not that hard …

Steps:

  1. Identify your CPU architecture

    uname -m

  2. Visit the pi_portal releases page and download:

    • the correct filebeat tarball for your CPU

    • the pi_portal python wheel

  3. Assume root privileges:

    sudo su

  4. Install filebeat:

    # as root
tar xvzf filebeat-linux-[x-x-x]-[architecture].tar.gz -C /usr/bin

  5. Install the Python build dependencies. (Commands and exact package names vary by distribution.)

    • bash

    • build-essential

    • libffi-dev

    • libssl-dev

    • python3 (Versions 3.8 through 3.11 are supported.)

    • python3-dev (Versions 3.8 through 3.11 are supported.)

    • Note: you may also need to install packages such as python3-venv and python3-pip if they aren’t included in your distribution’s core python3 package.

  6. Install the runtime dependencies. (Commands and exact package names vary by distribution.)

  7. It would be prudent to stop any services launched for motion or supervisor at this point.

    • The installer will attempt this as well, but your distribution may have an unknown init system.

  8. Create the pi-portal user:

    # as root
useradd pi-portal --no-create-home -s /bin/false -l

  9. Create a configuration file based on your Slack Bot and GPIOs.

  10. Install the pi_portal wheel:

    # as root
mkdir -p /opt/venvs
python3 -m venv /opt/venvs/pi-portal 
source /opt/venvs/pi-portal/bin/activate
pip install ./pi_portal-x.x.x-py3-none-any.whl
chown -R pi-portal:pi-portal /opt/venvs/pi-portal

  11. While still acting as root, install your configuration file:

    # as root
pi_portal install_config [your_config_file.json]

  12. Confirm you install was successful:

    # as root
portal version

  13. Drop root privileges:

    # as root
exit

  14. You may need to manually start the supervisor service if the installer doesn’t recognize your init system.

  15. Log into Slack and start interacting with your camera and sensors.