DietPi Tools¶

• Begin by selecting Browse Software in the main menu list and hit Enter.

• Scroll through the list of available software - for more details check the DietPi software list.

The list of optimised software is long. You either browse the list or use the option Search Software.

• To install software on your DietPi, select it in the list and press Space to add it to the installation list. If you change your mind, hit Space again to remove it.

• Once you’ve selected the software you wish to install, press Tab to switch to the confirmation options at the bottom. Select OK, then hit Enter to confirm.

• To begin installing your software, select Install from the main menu list, then hit Enter. DietPi will ask you to confirm your choice(s). Select OK, then hit Enter to begin the installation.

The software you selected will begin to install at this point. Once the process is completed, you may be asked to restart your device. Press OK to confirm.

DietPi supports a large number of software titles. Instead of scrolling through the Browse Software list to find a specific software title, you may use the Search Software option. Type in the software ID or any keyword from its title or description and you’ll get a list filtered by matching results.

This lets you select your preferred SSH server. Also you can uninstall any SSH server to save memory and to exclude any external ssh based access.

Various logging methods can be selected from lightweight to full. If you don’t require log files, get a performance boost. If you need full system logging features, DietPi can do that too.

The Log System can be changed at any time by selecting a different “Log System” from the menu.

See log system choices for further details.

In DietPi, we class user data as:

• Data storage for applications. Some examples are ownCloud/Nextcloud data store, BitTorrent downloads and SQL data store.
• The location where your File Server choice will point to, if you install one, like Samba Server or ProFTPD.
• The location where you can upload and store your media content, for other applications to use, like Kodi, Emby or Plex.

For all software you install in dietpi-software, you can access your user data with /mnt/dietpi_userdata. Regardless of where the data is physically stored, a symlink will automatically be created for you if needed.
To check where the physical location is, you can run the following command:

readlink -f /mnt/dietpi_userdata

You can move your user data to another location (e.g. USB drive). Simply run dietpi-software and enter the User data location menu option:

• If you need to setup a new external drive, select Drive Manager to launch DietPi-Drive Manager.
• Use the List option to select from a list of mounted drives, or, select Manual for a custom location.

DietPi will automatically move your existing user data to your new location.

Install software item(s) which have been selected via Browse Software list, via Search Software, or via the SSH Server, File Server or Log System choices.

Select one or more software items which you would like to be removed from your DietPi system.

Beside the interactive software installation via dietpi-software with checking wanted software packages and installing them, there is the option of installing the software packages via the shell command line.
The usage of dietpi-software is:

Usage: dietpi-software [<command> [<software_id>...]]
Available commands:
  <empty>     Interactive menu to install or uninstall software
  install     <software_id>...  Install each software given by space-separated list of IDs
  reinstall   <software_id>...  Reinstall each software given by space-separated list of IDs
  uninstall   <software_id>...  Uninstall each software given by space-separated list of IDs
  list        Print a list with IDs and info for all available software titles
  free        Print an unused software ID, free for a new software implementation

The <software_id> which has to be given is the one which is present in the software list within the dietpi-software dialogues:

E.g. to install Chromium, LXQt and GIMP you have to run next command in the terminal:

dietpi-software install 113 173 174

Although we enable forced encryption on all our BitTorrent clients, if you wish to ensure complete privacy and piece of mind for all your downloaded content, using a VPN is critical.
You can use any VPN provider you want, but DietPi-VPN specifically supports ProtonVPN and NordVPN.

Simply run dietpi-vpn to use the GUI, allowing you to setup your connection and provider.
DietPi will also automatically start and connect the VPN during system boot if you select autostart.

DietPi-VPN comes with an optional killswitch that will shut off your internet in the case of you losing your connection to the VPN sever. This will still allow access from your LAN and allow you to fix any problems using SSH, if needed.

• DuckDNS: https://www.duckdns.org/
• No-IP: https://www.noip.com/
• Dynu: https://www.dynu.com/
• FreeDNS: https://freedns.afraid.org/
• OVH: https://docs.ovh.com/gb/en/domains/hosting_dynhost/
• Alternatively you may use any other provider which has an API URL for updating your dynamic IP address.

Type dietpi-ddns -h to get an overview of supported CLI commands and options:

• If no argument is given, the interactive menu is started.
• Use dietpi-ddns <options> apply <provider> to apply a cron job for the given provider and use the following options set details:
  • <provider> is either the name of a supported provider, or any custom update URL.
  • Use -d <domains> to add one or a comma-separated list of multiple domains, which should point to the public IP address of this system.
  • Use -u <username> to set a username or identifier. This is not required for all providers, in case of a custom provider, it is used as username for HTTP authentication.
  • Use -p <password> to set a password or token. This is not required for all providers, in case of a custom provider, it is used as username for HTTP authentication.
  • Use -t <timespan> to set an update interval in minutes, which is purely optional and defaults to 10 minutes.
  • If you did already setup DietPi-DDNS before, the apply command can also be used to change one of the above settings. All other options are optional then.
• Use dietpi-ddns remove to remove any cron job that was setup before.

The display options are used to

• Set your screen resolution, or go headless to save additional resources.
• Control your GPU memory splits.
• Enable/disable the RPi camera.

The audio options are used to

• Change sound cards with ease (e.g.: HiFiBerry / Odroid HiFi shield).

The performance options are used to

• Overclock your system with a vast selection of overclocking profiles for your device.
• Change the CPU governor and tweak your ARM temperature limits.

The advanced options are used to

• Configure swap file size
• Configure time synchronization and real time clock source
• Update device firmware
• Toggle serial console
• Toggle Bluetooth

The security options are used to

• Change password and hostname

The language/regional options are used to

• Set timezone, locale and keyboard options. Everything you will need to make it feel like home

The network options are used to

• Scan and connect to your WiFi router with ease
• Change to a static IP address on your network
• Configure your proxy settings
• Test internet connection
• Toggle IPv6 support

The miscellaneous network options options are used to

• Select an APT mirror to connect to the Debian (or Raspbian) APT repository.
• Select an NTP mirror to synchronise your system time.
• Choose timeouts for network and URL connection tests.
• Network Drives redirects you to the DietPi-Drive_Manager which allows you to mount Samba and NFS shares on your DietPi system.
• No-IP is a dynamic DNS provider which allows you to access your home network/server with a static domain name. The client is required to inform No-IP of your current dynamic external IP on a regular basis.

The autostart options are used to

• Quickly and easily change what software runs after boot. Kodi, Desktop, console and many more

The tools options are used to

• Perform CPU, RAM, filesystem and network benchmarks, optionally upload your results and review statistics at: https://dietpi.com/survey/#benchmark
• Perform CPU/IO/RAM/DISK stress tests to test the stability of your system, e.g. after applying some overclocking.

To use an additional drive (example USB drive) the following steps have to be done:

1. Run dietpi-drive_manager to bring up the main menu.
2. Plug in the drive you wish to use.
3. Select Refresh from the menu (if it doesn’t show up straight away, give it a few seconds for system to update, then try again).

4. Select the drive you wish to use from the list, then press Enter.

   

   If needed, format the drive before usage selecting the Format option (filesystem type description see below).
   Remark: Formatting drives can only be done unmounted.

   If needed, mount the drive via the Mount selection. If mounted, commands Unmount, Benchmark, User data, Swapfile and Read only are present.

   

You can move the location of the DietPi user data (default /mnt/dietpi_userdata) or the swap file to a different location on a target drive. This may be useful if your filesystem containing the DietPi user data resp. swap file has only little space left. Therefore execute the following steps (example user data, swap file is quite similar):

1. Run dietpi-drive_manager to bring up the main menu.
2. Have the target drive connected and mounted (see description above).
3. Select the target drive and press Enter.

4. In the drives menu select User data resp. Swapfile and follow the instructions.

   • Move user data:

   

   • Change swap file size:

   

Formatting filesystems lead you to these dialogues:

In the latter dialog you have to choose the filesystem type. The following selections may be chosen:

• ext4 (Default)
  Recommended for users who plan to use this drive solely on Linux systems (e.g. dedicated drive).
  + The standard for Linux filesystems
  - Not compatible on a Windows system

• NTFS
  Recommended for users who plan to use this drive on a Windows system.
  + Compatible on a Windows system
  - Only emulated support for UNIX permissions
  - Does support symbolic links (creation)
  - High CPU usage during transfers (spawns a process)

• FAT32
  Recommended for users who want high compatibility across multiples operating systems.
  + Highly compatible with all OS
  - 4 GiB file size limit
  - 2 TiB drive size limit
  - Does not support UNIX permissions
  - Does not support symbolic links

• exFAT
  Windows filesystem, intended for external drives, e.g. USB flash drives or SD cards.
  + Flash-Friendly File System: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
  + Compatible on a Windows system
  - Does not support UNIX permissions
  - Does not support symbolic links

• HFS+
  Recommended for users who plan to use this drive on a macOS system.
  + macOS filesystem
  - Not compatible on a Windows system

• Btrfs
  A modern Linux filesystem.
  + Advantages were described in this DietPi issue
  - Compatible with Windows only via additional windows driver WinBtrfs

• F2FS
  Linux filesystem designed for flash/NAND based drives.
  + Flash-Friendly File System: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F2FS
  - Not compatible on a Windows system

• XFS
  A modern Linux filesystem.
  + Well accepted for large files (typically in a file server use)
  - Not compatible on a Windows system

If you want to extend your DietPi SD card space by moving the system to a larger memory card, this can be achieved by the following steps:

1. Shutdown your system and put the SD card into a card reader of a different systems.
2. Copy the SD card contents to the new (larger) SD card. This can e.g. be done using
   • the dd command (command line option)
   • balenaEtcher or Rufus (graphical user interface option)
   • gnome-disks (graphical user interface option)
3. Boot the system with the copied memory card.
4. Run dietpi-drive_manager to bring up the main menu.
5. Select the disk containing the root (/) partition and press Enter.

6. Select Resize and press Enter.

   

7. Reboot your system to expand the root filesystem to use the whole space of the new memory card.

A similar procedure may be used when moving the SD card contents to a smaller SD card. During this procedure you typically need to shrink the partition size (e.g. with parted or gparted) before copying the partition image to a different memory card. Also, do the resize to use the full space on the new card.

If you want to mount a NFS drive or a Samba share, you can do this by:

1. Run dietpi-drive_manager to bring up the main menu.
2. Select Add network drive.
3. Select the type of network drive that you have.
4. Follow the prompts.

The DietPi Survey data file is sent when you install software with dietpi-software and update DietPi with dietpi-update.

The uploaded data is tiny (about 1 KB) and will not affect your internet bandwidth or system performance.

Within the command line program dietpi-survey the exact copy of the transmitted data can be viewed. The transmitted file is written in bash code to allow us faster report page creation (e.g. done for https://dietpi.com/survey).

Following is an example how this file may look like:

#!/bin/bash
((aDIETPI_VERSION[6.34]++))
((aGIT_BRANCH[MichaIng/master]++))
((aDEVICE_NAME[Virtual Machine (x86_64)]++))
((aCPU_ARCH[x86_64]++))
((aCPU_COUNT[2]++))
((aDISTRO_VERSION[buster]++))
((aAUTOSTART_OPTION[${aAUTOSTART_NAME[0]:=0}]++))
((aAUTO_SETUP_AUTOMATED[0]++))
((aNETWORK_INTERFACE[eth0]++))
# -------------------------
# DietPi-Software installs
# -------------------------
((aSOFTWARE[${aSOFTWARE_NAME6_34[103]:=103}]++))
((aSOFTWARE[${aSOFTWARE_NAME6_34[104]:=104}]++))

The tail of the file lists installed software packages by their IDs. The example above shows a very basic system, so only two software packages (#103: DietPi-RAMlog, #104: Dropbear) are installed. To find out the names of the installed software package IDs installed via dietpi-software you can execute

dietpi-software list | grep ' =2'

This gives the IDs, names and info of software. The above example would show

# dietpi-software list | grep ' =2'
id 103 | =2 | dietpi-ramlog: minimal, optimised logging | | https://dietpi.com/docs/software/log_system/#dietpi-ramlog
id 104 | =2 | dropbear: lightweight ssh server | | https://dietpi.com/docs/software/ssh/#dropbear

You can select Opt-in or Opt-out of DietPi Survey by running the following command and follow the instructions:

dietpi-survey

This may also be achieved by setting SURVEY_OPTED_IN=0 (Opt-out) or SURVEY_OPTED_IN=1 (Opt-in) in /boot/dietpi.txt before the first system boot.

To check the actual status, dietpi-survey may be called. The current mode will be pre-selected and highlighted.
Alternatively you can use

grep 'SURVEY_OPTED_IN' /boot/dietpi.txt

which displays the status like

# grep 'SURVEY_OPTED_IN' /boot/dietpi.txt
SURVEY_OPTED_IN=1

Dietpi-Backup gives the option of an automatic daily backup function (controlled via the Linux cron mechanism).

It contains these options (see screenshot above):

• “Daily Backup”: Activates the daily backup
• “Amount”: Sets the number of backups to be kept. Backups are rotated automatically, if the maximum amount has been reached, the oldest backup is used as basis for the incremental new backup sync

Daily backup execution time

The automatic daily backup (activated via option “Daily Backup”, see screenshot above) is controlled via the Linux cron mechanism. Setting a different starting time can be an option, e.g. if you have several backup clients backing up to the same storage (backup server): Shifting the backup starting time of these systems may reduce temporary overload of the backup server by avoiding concurrent access to the storage.

The starting time is basically defined via the file /etc/crontab (which calls the backup/restore function via the /etc/cron.daily/dietpi script). It can be changed via the entry cron.daily within dietpi-cron. It is executed by running the following command

dietpi-cron

Please keep in mind that all other daily cron based procedures are also started at this changed time.

The definition which files are used for the backup procedure is defined via the option “Filter” (see screenshot above). This opens nano to edit the include/exclude definitions for the backup.
The filter definition syntax is described within the file itself.

The file containing the filter definitions is /boot/dietpi/.dietpi-backup_inc_exc.

A space check on the target location prior to the backup process can be enabled/disabled. This might be an option if there is surely enough disk space available.
Enabling the space check makes the backup a bit more safe, disabling it speeds it up.

Logging information about the backup procedure is given within the files .dietpi-backup_stats and .dietpi-backup.log which are located in the backup target directory (“Location” option):

• .dietpi-backup_stats gives a list of completed operations with time and date
• .dietpi-backup.log gives a list of every processed file

Generally, the settings of the DietPi-Backup are changed via the dietpi-backup command menu entries.

The system stores these settings in the files /boot/dietpi/.dietpi-backup_settings and /boot/dietpi/.dietpi-backup_inc_exc, which are generated from dietpi-backup automatically. Therefore, the files do not need to be changed manually by the user.

DietPi-Backup can be run from the command line or from scripts without user interaction by calling it via

dietpi-backup 1

A similar restore procedure is not recommended to avoid accidentally system overwrites. But to skip navigating through the menu, it can be done as well via

dietpi-backup -1

This setting gives these options:

• “Off”: In this case all synchronized files are copied from the source to the target directory keeping all files previously existing in the target directory
• “On”: In this case all files previously existing in the target directory which do not exist in the source directory will be deleted to achieve an exact copy of your source directory

Dietpi-Sync gives the option of an automatic daily sync operation (controlled via the Linux cron mechanism) by enabling the “Daily Sync” option.

Daily sync execution time

The automatic daily sync is controlled via the Linux cron mechanism. Setting a different starting time can be an option, e.g. if you have several sync clients syncing up to the same storage (data server): Shifting the synchronization starting time of these systems may reduce temporary overload of the data server by avoiding concurrent access to the storage.

The starting time is basically defined via the file /etc/crontab (which calls the sync function via the /etc/cron.daily/dietpi script). It can be changed via the entry cron.daily within dietpi-cron. It is executed by running the following command

dietpi-cron

Please keep in mind that all other daily cron based procedures are also started at this changed time.

The definition which files are used for the synchronization procedure is defined via the file

/boot/dietpi/.dietpi-sync_inc_exc

This file can be edited to set further include/exclude definitions for the synchronization. The filter definition syntax is described within the file itself.

The file structure definition is identical to the DietPi backup/restore file /boot/dietpi/.dietpi-backup_inc_exc where it is explained more in detail.

Logging information about the synchronization procedure is given within the file

.dietpi-sync.log

which is written to the sync target directory. It gives a list of every processed file.

The execution status of a previous synchronization process is given in the “Last sync status” entry at the top of the dietpi-sync dialog.

Generally, the settings of the DietPi-Sync are changed via the dietpi-sync command menu entries.

The system stores these settings in the file /boot/dietpi/.dietpi-sync_settings, which is generated from dietpi-sync automatically. Therefore, the file do not need to be changed manually by the user.
An example settings file is:

FP_SOURCE='/mnt/source'
FP_TARGET='/mnt/target'
SYNC_DELETE_MODE=0
SYNC_CRONDAILY=0

DietPi-Sync can be run from the command line or from scripts without user interaction by calling it via

dietpi-sync 1

Each sync includes a leading dry run, after which you can check the expected result before deciding if you want to continue with the actual sync: