Standalone deployment

This document will show how standalone deployments work with Mender, where no Mender server is used and the deployments are triggered at the device, either manually in the terminal or by custom scripts. This can be useful in order to deploy updates to devices which do not have network connectivity or are updated through external storage like a USB stick.

For an explanation of the difference between managed and standalone deployments, please see Modes of operation.

Setting Mender up for standalone mode

If you would like to run Mender in standalone mode, you must make sure that the Mender client does not run as a daemon. In most cases this will entail disabling or removing any systemd unit that starts the Mender client. If you want to check if Mender is running as a daemon, you can try the following command:

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo systemctl status mender-client
● mender-client.service - Mender OTA update service
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mender-client.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2020-07-23 03:24:54 BST; 16h ago
 Main PID: 320 (mender)
    Tasks: 9 (limit: 1012)
   Memory: 7.5M
   CGroup: /system.slice/mender-client.service
           └─320 /usr/bin/mender daemon

The status reported as active indicates that in order to use standalone mode you have to stop and disable Mender running as a daemon.

pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo systemctl stop mender-client
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo systemctl disable mender-client
pi@raspberrypi:~$ sudo systemctl mask mender-client

Deploy an Artifact to a device

To deploy the new Artifact to your device, run the following command in the device terminal:

mender install <URI>

<URI> can be any type of file-based storage or an HTTP/HTTPS URL. For example, if you are updating from a USB stick, you could use /mnt/usb1/release1.mender. To use HTTPS, simply replace it with a URL like https://fileserver.example.com/mender/release1.mender.

Make the deployment permanent

If you are happy with the deployment, you can make it permanent by running the following command in your device terminal:

mender commit

By running this command, Mender will mark the update as successful and permanent.

To deploy another update, simply run mender install <URI> again, then reboot and commit.