Installing

This page describes how to install the Mender client on an existing Linux system. Installing Mender this way does not offer a full Mender board integration, so you can not carry out Operating System updates, however, it is possible to use Update Modules to update applications and other parts of the operating system.

If you need the full board integration, follow the device documentation in Operating System updates: Yocto Project or Operating System updates: Debian family.

Install Mender using the Debian package

Mender provides a Debian package (.deb) for convenience to install on e.g Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS.

See the instructions in our downloads section for the explicit steps required.

Configure the mender-client

The setup is different depending on your server configuration and the most common cases are shown below. Use mender setup --help to learn about all configuration options.

DEVICE_TYPE="<INSERT YOUR DEVICE TYPE>"
TENANT_TOKEN="<INSERT YOUR TOKEN FROM https://hosted.mender.io/ui/#/settings/my-organization>"

sudo mender setup \
            --device-type $DEVICE_TYPE \
            --hosted-mender \
            --tenant-token $TENANT_TOKEN \
            --demo-polling

DEVICE_TYPE="<INSERT YOUR DEVICE TYPE>"
SERVER_IP_ADDR="<INSERT THE IP ADDRESS OF YOUR DEMO SERVER>"

sudo mender setup \
            --device-type $DEVICE_TYPE \
            --demo-server \
            --server-ip $SERVER_IP_ADDR \
            --demo-polling

Finally, to restart the Mender service for the new configuration to take effect run the following command:

sudo systemctl restart mender-client

Install from source

As an alternative to using a Debian package, it is possible to install the Mender client from source by following the guidelines outlined in the README.md of the Mender client source repository.