Wifi Network Bootstrap for the Raspberry Pi

Comitup is a software package that provides a service to establish Wifi networking on a headless computer (that is, one with no video, keyboard, or mouse). Comitup supports the following capabilities:

• The comitup service, which automatically connects to any previously established Wifi Access Points, if possible. Otherwise, it will create a stand-alone Access Point with the name (SSID) ‘comitup-<nnn>’, where ‘<nnn>’ is a unique, persistent number.
• Defined ZeroConf mdns address name for ‘comitup-<nnn>.local’, advertising the IP address of the Raspbery Pi on all interfaces.
• Connection information is published as a _comitup._tcp service, visible using a ZeroConf Browser.
• A comitup-web service, which provides a web interface for selecting and authenticating against an existing Access Point.
• A captive portal, facilitating discovery of the web service on systems that support it.
• The portal also features a “Locate” function that will blink the front green LED on a a Raspberry Pi, allowing the user to discriminate between multiple Comitup Pi’s.
• If two wifi interfaces are available on the device, the comitup hotspot will remain on one, and the other will be used for the upstream connection. Routing/masquerading between the two networks is established automatically.
• A comitup-cli command-line utility for interacting with comitup.

The Comitup Image is a microSD disk image for the Raspberry Pi, providing an operating system with the comitup service included. The Comitup Image is an extension of standard Raspberry Pi OS which includes Comitup, and supports the following additional capabilities:

• The ssh service is enabled by default. Be sure to change the default user password.
• The Raspberry Pi Ethernet port will automatically configure for the host network if possible. If a DHCP server is not found, the port will set to a static configuration, with an IP address of 10.0.0.2/24.
• The hostname will be set to the comitup AP name on first boot.

Getting Comitup

You can get Comitup by installing the package, or by downloading a Raspberry Pi OS image including the package (the preferred method).

NOTE: Starting with the 2022-04-16 image, the local “pi” user has been replaced with the default “comitup” user. The password matches the user name - change it with the first logon

Comitup Image

To burn onto an SD card for the Raspberry Pi.

• Comitup Lite Image (2.7 GB, 794 MB compressed)
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• Comitup Image (5.4 GB, 1.8 GB compressed)
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Package Installation

• Raspberry Pi OS/Debian users can install the package with “sudo apt-get install comitup” (Bookworm users note that an updated python3-networkmanager package is required, available in the Comitup repository).
• New package versions are available in the Package Archive or the comitup repository (there is also a third-party RPM repo). The latest version can be downloaded here.
• Remove any references to wifi interfaces in “/etc/network/interfaces” so that Network Manager/Comitup can manage them.
• See Installing Comitup for other possible installation issues.

Documentation

• The Comitup Wiki (with Tutorial).
• Man pages
  • comitup (8)
  • comitup-conf (5)
  • comitup-web (8)
  • comitup-cli (1)
• Changelog

Support/Feedback

• Issues
• Discussions

Related Software

Comitup-Watch

Continuously monitor the status of connected and unconnected nearby Comitup-enabled devices.

Comitup-Demo

Demonstrate the operation of a Comitup-enabled device, reporting connection status progress using voice synthesis.