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.
Download a .img.qcow2 from the latest release and boot it under any QEMU/KVM-capable hypervisor.
- Default credentials:
armbian/armbian(configured inuserpatches/firstboot.conf) - code-server (browser-based VS Code) on port
8443 - Build framework checked out at
~/workspace/build
- Curated source tree pre-cloned into the code-server workspace at
/armbian/code-server/config/workspace/(linked at~/workspacefor shell users): build, configng, documentation, website, imager. - Build dependencies pre-installed —
./compile.sh requirementshas 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
rootand thearmbianuser via Armbian'sPRESET_*_KEYfirstboot mechanism. - Asset manifest at a stable URL for programmatic consumption: https://github.com/armbian/sdk/releases/latest/download/armbian-images.json.
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
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-commitconfiguration - Bash / POSIX shell —
userpatches/customize-image.sh,userpatches/extensions/sdk.sh,userpatches/overlay/provisioning.sh, and the shell blocks inside workflowrun:steps ghCLI +jq— release management and manifest aggregation
For an overview of CI status and workflow history for this repository, see the Armbian CI dashboard.
- 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
