Armbian SDK

Purpose of This Repository

The Armbian SDK publishes ready-to-deploy generic Armbian images preloaded with the toolchain, source repositories, and dependencies needed to develop on the Armbian platform — drop one onto a cloud provider, Proxmox, or any QEMU/KVM-capable hypervisor and start building immediately.

Daily builds target uefi-x86 and uefi-arm64 on Ubuntu (resolute) and Debian (trixie) with the cloud kernel, published as .img.xz, .img.qcow2, and .iso.

Quick Start

Download a .img.qcow2 from the latest release and boot it under any QEMU/KVM-capable hypervisor.

• Default credentials: armbian / armbian (configured in userpatches/firstboot.conf)
• code-server (browser-based VS Code) on port 8443
• Build framework checked out at ~/workspace/build

What's Inside

• Curated source tree pre-cloned into the code-server workspace at /armbian/code-server/config/workspace/ (linked at ~/workspace for shell users): build, configng, documentation, website, imager.
• Build dependencies pre-installed — ./compile.sh requirements has already run in the rootfs, so the first build skips the apt phase.
• code-server installed on first boot via armbian-config --api module_code-server install, with the Python extension (ms-python.python) pre-installed and the Claude Code CLI available in the integrated terminal.
• SSH ready out of the box: maintainer's GitHub public keys baked into both root and the armbian user via Armbian's PRESET_*_KEY firstboot mechanism.
• Asset manifest at a stable URL for programmatic consumption: https://github.com/armbian/sdk/releases/latest/download/armbian-images.json.

Repository Layout

userpatches/
├── config-armbian-sdk.conf     # Armbian build target configuration
├── customize-image.sh          # in-chroot: clone sources, install deps, seed keys
├── firstboot.conf              # default user, credentials, PRESET_* keys
├── extensions/
│   └── sdk.sh                  # SDK build extension
└── overlay/
    └── provisioning.sh         # first-boot: install code-server, provision tooling
.github/
└── workflows/                  # daily build, release pruning, security scanning

How It's Built

The build workflow drives a {board} × {release} × {extension} matrix through the armbian/build composite action. Each cell runs the build chroot's customize-image.sh (clones, build deps, key seeding) and stages provisioning.sh for first boot (code-server install, extension provisioning, ownership handover). After the matrix completes, an aggregator job merges per-image manifests into a single armbian-images.json and promotes the release from pre-release to latest.

Tooling used across this repo:

• YAML — GitHub Actions workflows, Dependabot, and pre-commit configuration
• Bash / POSIX shell — userpatches/customize-image.sh, userpatches/extensions/sdk.sh, userpatches/overlay/provisioning.sh, and the shell blocks inside workflow run: steps
• gh CLI + jq — release management and manifest aggregation

Continuous Integration

For an overview of CI status and workflow history for this repository, see the Armbian CI dashboard.

Resources

• Armbian Documentation — Building, configuring, and customizing
• Armbian Build Framework — The framework this SDK targets
• Website — News, features, and board information
• Forums — Community support and discussions