Which Screenly version is right for me?
PLEASE NOTE: Screenly OSE and the commercial version of Screenly (formerly known as Screenly Pro) are two completely separate products. They do not share any code base and behave very differently both with regards to management and performance. Hence do not use one to evaluate the other.
Want to help OSE thrive? Support us using GitHub Sponsor.
Screenly OSE does not currently support the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (well). We are looking for volunteers to help us with this. The remaining work is tracked here. In short, we are doing a big overhaul (moving to Docker and QT/QTWebEngine). This will allow us to get things like a modern browser with hardware acceleration, as well as a simpler installation process.
If you got experience with QT, we'd love your help.
The recommended installation method is to grab the latest disk image from here.
The tl;dr for installing Screenly OSE on Raspbian Lite is:
$ bash <(curl -sL https://www.screenly.io/install-ose.sh)
This installation will take 15 minutes to several hours, depending on variables such as:
- The Raspberry Pi hardware version
- The SD card
- The internet connection
During ideal conditions (Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, class 10 SD card and fast internet connection), the installation normally takes 15-30 minutes. On a Raspberry Pi Zero or Raspberry Pi Model B with a class 4 SD card, the installation will take hours. As such, it is usually a lot faster to use the provided disk images.
Running Screenly OSE on balenaCloud is a breeze. Just click the Deploy with balena button below:
Alternatively, you can install manually on balenaCloud using the following commands:
$ git clone git@github.com:Screenly/screenly-ose.git
$ cd screenly-ose
$ git remote add balena username@git.balena-cloud.com:username/myscreenlyapp.git
$ git push balena master
Once the build is done, the device will automatically pull down the image and start running.
The releases are based on the Sprints. At the end of each sprint, we merge the master branch (also known as the developer version), into the production branch and generate a new disk image.
Should you want to upgrade to the latest development version (for instance if you want to try a bug-fix), you can do this by simply re-running the installation script and select that you want to install the development version. Re-running the installation script should normally not take more than a few minutes (depending on how much changed).
To learn more about Screenly, please visit the official website at Screenly.io.
Quick links:
Screenly OSE works on all Raspberry Pi versions, including Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.
To simplify development of the server module of Screenly OSE, we've created a Docker container. This is intended to run on your local machine with the Screenly OSE repository mounted as a volume.
Assuming you're in the source code repository, simply run:
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up
nosetests --with-doctest