Installing | Mender documentation

Client installation Installing

This page describes how to install the Mender Client on an existing Linux system. Installing Mender this way does not offer a full Mender board integration, so you can not carry out Operating System updates, however, it is possible to use Update Modules to update applications and other parts of the operating system.

If you need the full board integration, follow the device documentation in Operating System updates: Yocto Project or Operating System updates: Debian family.

Install Mender using the Debian package

Mender provides a Debian package (.deb) for convenience to install on e.g Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS.

See the instructions in our downloads section for the explicit steps required.

Configure the Mender Client

The setup is different depending on your server configuration and the most common cases are shown below. Use mender setup --help to learn about all configuration options.

Set the following variables:

DEVICE_TYPE="<INSERT YOUR DEVICE TYPE>"
TENANT_TOKEN="<INSERT YOUR TOKEN FROM https://hosted.mender.io/ui/#/settings/my-organization>"

Configure Mender with:

sudo mender-setup \
            --device-type $DEVICE_TYPE \
            --hosted-mender \
            --tenant-token $TENANT_TOKEN \
            --demo-polling

Set the following variables:

DEVICE_TYPE="<INSERT YOUR DEVICE TYPE>"
SERVER_IP_ADDR="<INSERT THE IP ADDRESS OF YOUR DEMO SERVER>"

Configure Mender with:

sudo mender-setup \
            --device-type $DEVICE_TYPE \
            --demo-server \
            --server-ip $SERVER_IP_ADDR \
            --demo-polling

Set the following variables:

DEVICE_TYPE="<INSERT YOUR DEVICE TYPE>"
SERVER_URL="<INSERT YOUR ENTERPRISE SERVER URL>"
TENANT_TOKEN="<INSERT YOUR TOKEN FROM YOUR ENTERPRISE SERVER>"

Configure Mender with:

sudo mender-setup \
            --device-type $DEVICE_TYPE \
            --server-url $SERVER_URL \
            --server-cert="" \
            --tenant-token $TENANT_TOKEN \
            --demo-polling

Note: Before mender-setup 4.0.0 was released, the setup command was built into the mender binary. If you are using Mender Client below version 4.0.0, use mender setup instead of mender-setup in the snippets above (note the dash), as well as on the rest of the page below.

Finally, to restart the Mender service for the new configuration to take effect run the following command:

sudo systemctl restart mender-updated

If you are using a Mender Client older than 4.0.0, replace mender-updated with mender-client in the snippet above.

Install from source

As an alternative to using a Debian package, it is possible to install the Mender Client from source by following the guidelines outlined in the README.md of the Mender Client source repository.

We welcome contributions to improve this documentation. To submit a change, use the Edit link at the top of the page or email us at .