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pi-usb-automount

Auto mount USB flash drives on a headless/console-only Raspberry Pi.

Forked from Fernando Carmona Varo's udev-media-automount and modified by Edward Wright.

Available at https://github.com/fasteddy516/pi-usb-automount

Description

This is a modified version of udev-media-automount created specifically for use with Raspberry Pis and USB flash drives when a full desktop environment is not installed. (i.e. Raspberry Pi OS Lite, headless installations, kiosk and other purpose-built applications, etc.)

Once pi-usb-automount is installed, a USB drive will be automatically mounted and accessible in /media/usb0 when it is connected, and will be automatically unmounted when it is removed. If multiple USB drives are connected, they will appear as usb1, usb2, etc.

Compatibility

pi-usb-automount has been tested exclusively with Raspberry Pi models 4B and 5 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite based on Debian 12 (bookworm) along with a variety of USB flash drives all formatted as a single FAT16 or FAT32 partition. It may work on other platforms, and certainly should work with other device types and filesystems also supported by udev-media-automount, but no testing has been done for those use cases. Also note that running udev-media-automount and pi-usb-automount at the same time is not supported.

If you are successfully using pi-usb-automount under conditions that I haven't mentioned above, please let me know and I can update the information accordingly.

Installation

Use the following commands to install pi-usb-automount on your Raspberry Pi:

wget https://github.com/fasteddy516/pi-usb-automount/releases/latest/download/pi-usb-automount.deb
sudo dpkg -i pi-usb-automount.deb

After the installation completes you can safely remove the .deb file with the command rm pi-usb-automount.deb.

To uninstall pi-usb-automount but leave its configuration files in /etc/pi-usb-automount.d, use sudo dpkg -r pi-usb-automount. To remove everything including configuration files, use sudo dpkg --purge pi-usb-automount.

Troubleshooting

To check the logs produced by pi-usb-automount, run journalctl -t pi-usb-automount. Add -b to limit the results to the current boot only.

Configuration

No configuration is required for typical read/write access to USB flash drive contents. However, the folder /etc/pi-usb-automount.d can be used to set custom mount options for specific file system types if desired.

If a file with a name matching a filesystem type (eg. vfat, nfts, etc) is found, it will be loaded when a device using the given filesystem is to be mounted. This can be used to change the parameters provided to mount.

An example below for /etc/media-automount.d/ntfs:

# Mount options to use for auto-mounting NTFS drives
AUTOMOUNT_OPTS='errors=remount-ro,relatime,utf8,user,flush'

# Always use NTFS-3G to automount NTFS filesystems
AUTOMOUNT_TYPE="ntfs-3g"

Note that these files are sourced as shell scripts, so it's possible to include logic in them in case you want to conditionally apply some configuration.

Differences from udev-media-automount

pi-usb-automount differs from udev-media-automount in that it:

  • Is intended for - and tested on - Raspberry Pis

  • Is easily installable (and removeable!) in Raspberry Pi OS via a .deb package

  • Only mounts devices identified as sd[a-z] (i.e. sda, sdb, etc.) Devices identified as vd, mmcblk or nvme are all ignored.

  • Uses a different, more generic naming convention for mount points; /media/usb0, /media/usb1, etc.

Contributing

If you have questions, problems, feature requests, etc. please post them to the Issues section on Github. If you would like to contribute, please let me know.