16 Jul '25

Automated RPi Web Kiosk Setup in 2025

As part of a recent art installation I’ve needed to set up lots (well, dozens) of Raspberry 5s to run as fullscreen Chromium “kiosks” with a pre-set URL (network connected, but with no keyboard/mouse).

They’ve all needed slightly different kiosk URLs, and I hate doing this sort of busy-work by hand. So I’ve spent longer than I’d like to admit¹ putting together a fully scripted burn-and-boot process. My non-negotiables were:

script needs to be fully automated (though it turns out it only works on Linux now due to the tools required)
once the SD card is put into an rpi and plugged in, everything should be automatic (join network, install and configure software and OS)
I need a way to remotely access the rpis once “in the field” (in particular, sometimes I need to change their kiosk URL)

I thought that this would be a pretty common thing that others would have done—rpis are cheap and seem like a good fit for this type of “web browser as installation display” thing. But I kept running into dead ends.

I finally got it fully working with Raspberry Pi OS (Bookworm) as the OS and labwc as the compositor (which is the default on RPi OS). To save you the trouble, dear reader, I’ve packaged it all up into a script (which works as of the date of this post—July 2025) and put it here. From that folder’s README.md:

This directory contains scripts for setting up Raspberry Pi 5 devices as browser kiosks that boot directly into fullscreen Chromium displaying a specified URL.

The setup process uses:

install-sdm.sh - Installs SDM (SD Card Image Management tool) - one-time setup

pi-setup.sh - Creates customized Raspberry Pi OS SD cards with kiosk mode

The resulting installation:

boots directly into GPU-accelerated kiosk mode using labwc Wayland compositor (RPi OS default)

automatically joins your Tailscale network

supports native display resolutions including 4K at 60Hz

configures WiFi (WPA2 and enterprise 802.1X)

includes HDMI audio support

optimized specifically for Raspberry Pi 5

provides a kiosk-set-url utility for easy URL changes

uses official Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm (64-bit)

I hope this saves you some time. Use it to hug your loved ones.

I thought it’d take a day, it’s taken about a week, on and off :( ↩