pibootctl 0.5

pibootctl is a utility for querying and manipulating the boot configuration of a Raspberry Pi. It is a relatively low level utility, and not intended to be as friendly (or as widely applicable) as raspi-config. It provides a command line interface only, but does attempt to be useful as a basis for more advanced interfaces (by providing input and output in human-readable, shell-interpretable, JSON, or YAML formats) as well as being useful in its own right.

The design philosophy of the utility is as follows:

1. Be safe: the utility manipulates the boot configuration and it’s entirely possible to create a non-booting system as a result. To that end, if no backup of the current boot configuration exists, always take one before manipulating it.

2. Be accessible: the Pi’s boot configuration lives on a FAT partition and is a simple ASCII text file. This means it can be read and manipulated by almost any platform (Windows, Mac OS, etc). Any backups of the configuration should be as accessible. To that end we use simple PKZIP files to store backups of boot configurations (in their original format), and place them on the same FAT partition as the configuration.

3. Be extensible: Almost all commands should default to human readable input and output, but options should be provided for I/O in JSON, YAML, and a shell-parseable format.