Installation of NOOBS creates a partition on the SD card, /dev/mmcblk0p1. This partition contains files needed for install (details are available at https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs/wiki/NOOBS-partitioning-explained). So only thing you need to do is to download new Noobs, mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 on device and replace files.
So you need do something like following to update NOOBS
curl https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS_latest -L -o noobs.zipThen you can boot up the Raspberry and start the NOOBS recovery by pressing shift -key during start up. But I'm too lazy to do even that. Luckily it is possible to make the NOOBS automatically start recovery and install new OS.
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
sudo rm -rf /mnt/*
sudo unzip noobs.zip -d /mnt/
The behaviour of NOOBS can be controlled with commandline options. These options are defined in file called "recovery.cmdline" in the root of /dev/mmcblk0p1. The default contents of the file are following:
quiet ramdisk_size=32768 root=/dev/ram0 init=/init vt.cur_default=1 elevator=deadline
To make the installer start by default, you have to add "runinstaller" option. This only starts the installer, but it will need user input to continue. Another option, silentinstall, will tell the installer to go forth and install OS. Just make sure that there is only one OS in os/ -directory, and if it has more that one flavour, edit it's flavours.json file (details in https://github.com/raspberrypi/noobs#how-to-automatically-install-an-os).
So the recovery.cmdline should have following contents
runinstaller silentinstall quiet ramdisk_size=32768 root=/dev/ram0 init=/init vt.cur_default=1 elevator=deadlineAfter installation, the installer does remove the "runinstaller" -option from recovery.cmdline so it does not reinstall on every boot. The "silentinstall" option remains, though.
So when everything is in place, at next reboot, there's a new version of noobs, and it will install the OS automatically. Just remember, that everything on Raspberry will be wiped!
Here's a ansible playbook that does everything. It will take quite a while to complete, as the NOOBS image file is pretty big and takes a while to download and transfer to hosts. Reason why I'm downloading NOOBS to local machine is that I'm running this playbook with six Raspberries and it should be faster to download NOOBS once to local machine and the transfer it to Raspberries instead if downloading it on every Raspberry
- hosts: all
vars:
- noobs_file: noobs.zip
- recovery_directory: /mnt/recovery
tasks:
- name: download noobs if not present
local_action: get_url url=https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/NOOBS_latest dest={{playbook_dir}}/{{noobs_file}}
become: no
- name: mount device
mount: name=/mnt/recovery src=/dev/mmcblk0p1 fstype=vfat state=mounted
- name: remove old noobs
file: path={{recovery_directory}}/* state=absent
- name: unzip noobs
unarchive: src={{noobs_file}} dest={{recovery_directory}} owner=root group=root
- name: set reinstall
lineinfile: dest={{recovery_directory}}/recovery.cmdline regexp='^(runinstaller)?\s?(silentinstall)?\s?(.*)$' line='runinstaller silentinstall \3' backrefs=yes
- name: unmount device
mount: name=/mnt/recovery src=/dev/mmcblk0p1 fstype=vfat state=unmounted
- name: reboot
command: shutdown -r now
ignore_errors: True
become: yes
