Interactive Bash script that performs a Balena Offline Update on an SD card

phaseOne · August 1, 2022, 2:46am

Hey there, I’d like to share this interactive utility to perform a Balena Offline Update on an SD card based on the steps in the Offline Updates section of the Balena Documentation. It makes the experience much more enjoyable than copying and pasting commands—especially so if this is a frequent manual task for you. I’ve tested it on macOS 12.4 M1 & Intel, and it should work on other Linux platforms. I’ve also checked it with ShellCheck.

Please share your feedback with me! If you have the time, please contribute patches via a fork or your preferred method.

If there’s enough love for this script, maybe I’ll port it to TS for the balena-cli someday.

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/phaseOne/858e3f15763e1adf650ff7dbdb3139ba

balena-offline-update.sh

#!/bin/bash

# NOTE: This script requires that jq is installed on your system.

set -euo pipefail
# set -x

echo "Specify the path to your SSH public key. It will be added to the device and used to SSH into the device after provisioning to help in debugging if needed."
read -r -p 'Path to your SSH public key: ' ssh_key
if [ -z "$ssh_key" ]; then

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maggie0002 · August 2, 2022, 8:49am

@phaseOne, a solution to a real world problem, I love it! Thanks for sharing this. My first thoughts, how are we going to make sure people stay aware of this rather than the thread start to get lost in the forums. We want it to keep evolving and for you to keep benefiting from others contributing. That’s on us, and I will be giving it a lot of thought and come back to you on it.

I think this could also create an avenue to make it even more fluid a process! I wonder if it would work well containerised that could be pulled and run. It could provide a stable environment to run in, and avoid issues like with missing dependencies such as jq. I think most of our users will have Docker installed so wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Never one to turn away a challenge, I am also wondering how the same solution may be able to bridge the issue of it not backing up volumes (Offline updates - Balena Documentation). Just putting ideas out there, see what collective brain power brings.

Really makes my day to see these things, do ping me in the future if you post other things that solve these real problems.

maggie0002 · August 8, 2022, 10:50am

@phaseOne, here is a balena Awesome list which I am going to start to populate more and use more actively. I think this is the answer to the question of how we will make sure your project gets lots of attention and input and isn’t lost in the forums. Would you be able to raise a pull request on the repository to add your script?