etcher Documentation

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

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1. Project Overview & Quickstart (balena-io/etcher)

File: README.md

Etcher

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

Etcher is a powerful OS image flasher built with web technologies to ensure
flashing an SDCard or USB drive is a pleasant and safe experience. It protects
you from accidentally writing to your hard-drives, ensures every byte of data
was written correctly, and much more. It can also directly flash Raspberry Pi devices that support USB device boot mode.



Download | Support | Documentation | Contributing | Roadmap

Supported Operating Systems

  • Linux; most distros; Intel 64-bit.
  • Windows 10 and later; Intel 64-bit.
  • macOS 10.13 (High Sierra) and later; both Intel and Apple Silicon.

Installers

Refer to the downloads page for the latest pre-made
installers for all supported operating systems.

Packages

Debian and Ubuntu based Package Repository (GNU/Linux x86/x64)

Package for Debian and Ubuntu can be downloaded from the Github release page

Install .deb file using apt

sh
sudo apt install ./balena-etcher_******_amd64.deb

Uninstall

sh
sudo apt remove balena-etcher

Redhat (RHEL) and Fedora-based Package Repository (GNU/Linux x86/x64)

Yum

Package for Fedora-based and Redhat can be downloaded from the Github release page

  1. Install using yum
sh
sudo yum localinstall balena-etcher-***.x86_64.rpm

Arch/Manjaro Linux (GNU/Linux x64)

Etcher is offered through the Arch User Repository and can be installed on both Manjaro and Arch systems. You can compile it from the source code in this repository using balena-etcher. The following example uses a common AUR helper to install the latest release:

sh
yay -S balena-etcher

Uninstall

sh
yay -R balena-etcher

WinGet (Windows)

This package is updated by gh-action, and is kept up to date automatically.

sh
winget install balenaEtcher #or Balena.Etcher

Uninstall

sh
winget uninstall balenaEtcher

Chocolatey (Windows)

This package is maintained by @majkinetor, and
is kept up to date automatically.

sh
choco install etcher

Uninstall

sh
choco uninstall etcher

Support

If you're having any problem, please raise an issue on GitHub, and
the balena.io team will be happy to help.

License

Etcher is free software and may be redistributed under the terms specified in
the license.

File: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md

Etcher Architecture

This document aims to serve as a high-level overview of how Etcher works,
specially oriented for contributors who want to understand the big picture.

Technologies

This is a non exhaustive list of the major frameworks, libraries, and other
technologies used in Etcher that you should become familiar with:

Module architecture

Instead of embedding all the functionality required to create a full-featured
image writer as a monolithic project, we try to hard to follow the "lego block
approach".

This has the advantage of allowing other applications to re-use logic we
implemented for Etcher in their own project, even for things we didn't expect,
which leads to users benefitting from what we've built, and we benefitting from
user's bug reports, suggestions, etc, as an indirect way to make Etcher better.

The fact that low-level details are scattered around many different modules can
make it challenging for a new contributor to wrap their heads around the
project as a whole, and get a clear high level view of how things work or where
to submit their work or bug reports.

These are the main Etcher components, in a nutshell:

As the name implies, this module's duty is to detect the connected drives
uniformly in all major operating systems, along with valuable metadata, like if
a drive is removable or not, to prevent users from trying to write an image to
a system drive.

This is the "main repository", from which you're reading this from, which is
basically the front-end and glue for all previously listed projects.

Summary

We always welcome contributions to Etcher as well as our documentation. If you
want to give back, but feel that your knowledge on how Etcher works is not
enough to tackle a bug report or feature request, use that as your advantage,
since fresh eyes could help unveil things that we take for granted, but should
be documented instead!

File: docs/COMMIT-GUIDELINES.md

Commit Guidelines

We enforce certain rules on commits with the following goals in mind:

  • Be able to reliably auto-generate the CHANGELOG.md without any human
    intervention.
  • Be able to automatically and correctly increment the semver version number
    based on what was done since the last release.
  • Be able to get a quick overview of what happened to the project by glancing
    over the commit history.
  • Be able to automatically reference relevant changes from a dependency
    upgrade.

Commit structure

Each commit message needs to specify the semver-type. Which can be patch|minor|major.
See the Semantic Versioning specification for a more detailed explanation of the meaning of these types.
See balena commit guidelines for more info about the whole commit structure.

text
<semver-type>: <subject>

or

text
<subject>



Change-Type: <semver-type>

The subject should not contain more than 70 characters, including the type and
scope, and the body should be wrapped at 72 characters.

Tags

This tag can be used to reference a resource that is relevant to the commit,
and can be repeated multiple times in the same commit.

Resource examples include:

  • A link to pull requests.
  • A link to a GitHub issue.
  • A link to a website providing useful information.
  • A commit hash.

Its recommended that you avoid relative URLs, and that you include the whole
commit hash to avoid any potential ambiguity issues in the future.

If the commit type equals upgrade, this tag should be present, and should
link to the CHANGELOG section of the dependency describing the changes
introduced from the previously used version.

Examples:

text
See: https://github.com/xxx/yyy/
See: 49d89b4acebd80838303b011d30517cd6229fdbe
Link: https://github.com/xxx/yyy/issues/zzz

`Closes: `/`Fixes: `

This tag is used to make GitHub close the referenced issue automatically when
the commit is merged.

Its recommended that you provide the absolute URL to the GitHub issue rather
than simply writing the ID prefixed by a hash tag for convenience when browsing
the commit history outside the GitHub web interface.

A commit can include multiple instances of this tag.

Examples:

text
Closes: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/XXX
Fixes: https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/issues/XXX

File: docs/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing Guide

Thanks for your interest in contributing to this project! This document aims to
serve as a friendly guide for making your first contribution.

High-level Etcher overview

Make sure you checkout our ARCHITECTURE.md guide, which aims to
explain how all the pieces fit together.

Developing

Prerequisites

Common

sh
pip install -r requirements.txt

You might need to run this with sudo or administrator permissions.

Windows

You might need to npm config set msvs_version 2019 for node-gyp to correctly detect
the version of Visual Studio you're using (in this example VS2019).

The following MinGW packages are required:

  • msys-make
  • msys-unzip
  • msys-zip
  • msys-bash
  • msys-coreutils

macOS

It's not enough to have Xcode Command Line Tools installed. Xcode must be installed
as well.

Linux

  • libudev-dev for libusb (for example install with sudo apt install libudev-dev, or on fedora systemd-devel contains the required package)

Cloning the project

sh
git clone --recursive https://github.com/balena-io/etcher
cd etcher

Running the application

GUI

sh
# Build and start application
npm start

Testing

To run the test suite, run the following command:

sh
npm test

Given the nature of this application, not everything can be unit tested. For
example:

  • The writing operating on real raw devices.
  • Platform inconsistencies.
  • Style changes.
  • Artwork.

We encourage our contributors to test the application on as many operating
systems as they can before sending a pull request.

The test suite is run automatically by CI servers when you send a pull
request.

We make use of EditorConfig to communicate indentation, line endings and
other text editing default. We encourage you to install the relevant plugin in
your text editor of choice to avoid having to fix any issues during the review
process.

Updating a dependency

  • Install new version of dependency using npm
  • Commit both package.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json.

Diffing Binaries

Binary files are tagged as "binary" in the .gitattributes file, but also have
a diff=hex tag, which allows you to see hexdump-style diffs for binaries,
if you add the following to either your global or repository-local git config:

sh
$ git config diff.hex.textconv hexdump
$ git config diff.hex.binary true

And global, respectively:

sh
$ git config --global diff.hex.textconv hexdump
$ git config --global diff.hex.binary true

If you don't have hexdump available on your platform,
you can try hxd, which is also a bit faster.

Commit Guidelines

See COMMIT-GUIDELINES.md for a thorough guide on how to
write commit messages.

Sending a pull request

When sending a pull request, consider the following guidelines:

  • Write a concise commit message explaining your changes.

  • If applies, write more descriptive information in the commit body.

  • Mention the operating systems with the corresponding versions in which you
    tested your changes.

  • If your change affects the visuals of the application, consider attaching a
    screenshot.

  • Refer to the issue/s your pull request fixes, so they're closed automatically
    when your pull request is merged.

  • Write a descriptive pull request title.

  • Squash commits when possible, for example, when committing review changes.

Before your pull request can be merged, the following conditions must hold:

  • The linter doesn't throw any warning.

  • All the tests pass.

  • The coding style aligns with the project's convention.

  • Your changes are confirmed to be working in recent versions of the operating
    systems we support.

Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions or need any help!

File: docs/FAQ.md

Why is my drive not bootable?

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of images, usually available from the image publishers themselves. You can find more information here.

How can I configure persistent storage?

Some programs, usually oriented at making GNU/Linux live USB drives, include an option to set persistent storage. This is currently not supported by Etcher, so if you require this functionality, we advise to fallback to UNetbootin.

How do I flash Ubuntu ISOs

Ubuntu images (and potentially some other related GNU/Linux distributions) have a peculiar format that allows the image to boot without any further modification from both CDs and USB drives.
A consequence of this enhancement is that some programs, like parted get confused about the drive's format and partition table, printing warnings such as:

/dev/xxx contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table. However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should. Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table? Both the primary and backup GPT tables are corrupt. Try making a fresh table, and using Parted's rescue feature to recover partitions.

Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes.

All these warnings are safe to ignore, and your drive should be able to boot without any problems.
Refer to the following message from Ubuntu's mailing list if you want to learn more.

How do I run Etcher on Wayland?

The XWayland Server provides backwards compatibility to run any X client on Wayland, including Etcher.
This usually works out of the box on mainstream GNU/Linux distributions that properly support Wayland. If it doesn't, make sure the xwayland.so module is being loaded by declaring it in your weston.ini:

text
[core]
modules=xwayland.so

What are the runtime GNU/LINUX dependencies?

This entry aims to provide an up to date list of runtime dependencies needed to run Etcher on a GNU/Linux system.

How can I recover the broken drive?

Sometimes, things might go wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that is unusable by your operating systems, and common graphical tools might even refuse to get it back to a normal state.
To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.

I receive "No polkit authentication agent found" error in GNU/Linux

Etcher requires an available polkit authentication agent in your system in order to show a secure password prompt dialog to perform elevation. Make sure you have one installed for the desktop environment of your choice.

May I run Etcher in older macOS versions?

Etcher GUI is based on the Electron framework, which only supports macOS 10.10 and newer versions.

Can I use the Flash With Etcher button on my site?

You can use the Flash with Etcher button on your site or blog, if you have an OS that you want your users to be able to easily flash using Etcher, add the following code where you want to button to be:

[](https://efp.balena.io/open-image-url?imageUrl=<your image URL>)

File: docs/MAINTAINERS.md

Maintaining Etcher

This document is meant to serve as a guide for maintainers to perform common tasks.

Releasing

Release Types

  • draft: A continues snapshot of current master, made by the CI services
  • pre-release (default): A continues snapshot of current master, made by the CI services
  • release: Full releases

Draft release is created from each PR, tagged with the branch name.
All merged PR will generate a new tag/version as a pre-release.
Mark the pre-release as final when it is necessary, then distribute the packages in alternative channels as necessary.

Preparation

Testing

  • Test the prepared release and build artifacts properly on all supported operating systems to prevent regressions that went uncaught by the CI tests (see MANUAL-TESTING.md)
  • If regressions or other issues arise, create issues on the repository for each one, and decide whether to fix them in this release (meaning repeating the process up until this point), or to follow up with a patch release

Publishing

Generating binaries

Environment

Make sure to set the analytics tokens when generating production release binaries:

bash
export ANALYTICS_SENTRY_TOKEN="xxxxxx"

Linux

Clean dist folder

Delete .webpack and out/.

Generating artifacts

The artifacts are generated by the CI and published as draft-release or pre-release.
Etcher is built with electron-forge. Run:

text
npm run make

Our CI will appropriately sign artifacts for macOS and some Windows targets.

Uploading packages to Cloudfront

Log in to cloudfront and upload the rpm and deb files.

Dealing with a Problematic Release

There can be times where a release is accidentally plagued with bugs. If you
released a new version and notice the error rates are higher than normal, then
revert the problematic release as soon as possible, until the bugs are fixed.

You can revert a version by deleting its builds from the S3 bucket and Bintray.
Refer to the Makefile for the up to date information about the S3 bucket
where we push builds to, and get in touch with the balena.io operations team to
get write access to it.

The Etcher update notifier dialog and the website only show the a certain
version if all the expected files have been uploaded to it, so deleting a
single package or two is enough to bring down the whole version.

Use the following command to delete files from S3:

bash
aws s3api delete-object --bucket  --key <file name>

The Bintray dashboard provides an easy way to delete a version's files.

Submitting binaries to Symantec

  • Report a Suspected Erroneous Detection
  • Fill out form:
    • Select Submission Type: "Provide a direct download URL"
    • Name of the software being detected: Etcher
    • Name of detection given by Symantec product: WS.Reputation.1
    • Contact name: Balena.io Ltd
    • E-mail address: [email protected]
    • Are you the creator or distributor of the software in question? Yes

File: docs/MANUAL-TESTING.md

Manual Testing

This document describes a high-level script of manual tests to check for. We
should aim to replace items on this list with automated Spectron test cases.

Image Selection

  • Cancel image selection dialog
  • Select an unbootable image (without a partition table), and expect a
    sensible warning
  • Attempt to select a ZIP archive with more than one image
  • Attempt to select a tar archive (with any compression method)
  • Change image selection
  • Select a Windows image, and expect a sensible warning

Drive Selection

  • Open the drive selection modal
  • Switch drive selection
  • Insert a single drive, and expect auto-selection
  • Insert more than one drive, and don't expect auto-selection
  • Insert a locked SD Card and expect a warning
  • Insert a too small drive and expect a warning
  • Put an image into a drive and attempt to flash the image to the drive
    that contains it
  • Attempt to flash a compressed image (for which we can get the
    uncompressed size) into a drive that is big enough to hold the compressed
    image, but not big enough to hold the uncompressed version
  • Enable "Unsafe Mode" and attempt to select a system drive
  • Enable "Unsafe Mode", and if there is only one system drive (and no
    removable ones), don't expect autoselection

Image Support

Run the following tests with and without validation enabled:

  • Flash an uncompressed image
  • Flash a Bzip2 image
  • Flash a XZ image
  • Flash a ZIP image
  • Flash a GZ image
  • Flash a DMG image
  • Flash an image whose size is not a multiple of 512 bytes
  • Flash a compressed image whose size is not a multiple of 512 bytes
  • Flash an archive whose image size is not a multiple of 512 bytes
  • Flash an archive image containing a logo
  • Flash an archive image containing a blockmap file
  • Flash an archive image containing a manifest metadata file

Flashing Process

  • Unplug the drive during flash or validation
  • Click "Flash", cancel elevation dialog, and click "Flash" again
  • Start flashing an image, try to close Etcher, cancel the application
    close warning dialog, and check that Etcher continues to flash the image

Child Writer

  • Kill the child writer process (i.e. with SIGINT or SIGKILL), and
    check that the UI reacts appropriately
  • Close the application while flashing using the window manager close icon
  • Close the application while flashing using the OS keyboard shortcut
  • Close the application from the terminal using Ctrl-C while flashing
  • Force kill the application (using a process monitor tool, etc)

In all these cases, the child writer process should not remain alive. Note that
in some systems you need to open your process monitor tool of choice with extra
permissions to see the elevated child writer process.

GUI

  • Close application from the terminal using Ctrl-C while the application is
    idle
  • Click footer links that take you to an external website
  • Attempt to change image or drive selection while flashing
  • Go to the settings page while flashing and come back
  • Flash consecutive images without closing the application
  • Remove the selected drive right before clicking "Flash"
  • Minimize the application
  • Start the application given no internet connection

Success Banner

  • Click an external link on the success banner (with and without internet
    connection)

Elevation Prompt

  • Flash an image as root/administrator
  • Reject elevation prompt
  • Put incorrect elevation prompt password
  • Unplug the drive during elevation

Unmounting

  • Disable unmounting and flash an image
  • Flash an image with a file system that is readable by the host OS, and
    check that is unmounted correctly

File: docs/PUBLISHING.md

Publishing Etcher

This is a small guide to package and publish Etcher to all supported operating
systems.

Release Types

Etcher supports pre-release and final release types as does Github. Each is
published to Github releases.
The release version is generated automatically from the commit messasges.

Signing

OS X

  1. Get our Apple Developer ID certificate for signing applications distributed
    outside the Mac App Store from the balena.io Apple account.

  2. Install the Developer ID certificate to your Mac's Keychain by double
    clicking on the certificate file.

The application will be signed automatically using this certificate when
packaging for OS X.

Windows

  1. Get access to our code signing certificate and decryption key as a balena.io
    employee by asking for it from the relevant people.

  2. Place the certificate in the root of the Etcher repository naming it
    certificate.p12.

Packaging

Run the following command on each platform:

sh
npm run make

This will produce all targets (eg. zip, dmg) specified in forge.config.ts for the
host platform and architecture.

The resulting artifacts can be found in out/make.

Publishing to Cloudfront

We publish GNU/Linux Debian packages to Cloudfront.

Log in to cloudfront and upload the rpm and deb files.

Publishing to Homebrew Cask

  1. Update Casks/etcher.rb with the new version and
    sha256

  2. Send a PR with the changes above to
    caskroom/homebrew-cask

Announcing

Post messages to the Etcher forum announcing the new version
of Etcher, and including the relevant section of the Changelog.

Updating EFP / Success-Banner

Etcher Featured Project is automatically run based on an algorithm which promoted projects from the balena marketplace which have been contributed by the community, the algorithm prioritises projects which give uses the best experience. Editing both EFP and the Etcher Success-Banner can only be done by someone from balena, instruction are on the Etcher-EFP repo (private)

File: docs/SUPPORT.md

Getting help with BalenaEtcher

There are various ways to get support for Etcher if you experience an issue or
have an idea you'd like to share with us.

Documentation

We have answers to a variety of frequently asked questions in the user
documentation and also in the FAQs on the Etcher website.

Forums

We have a Discourse forum which is open to everyone, so please
come join us :). Drop us a line there and the balena.io staff and community
users will be happy to assist. Your question might already be answered, so take
a look at the existing threads before opening a new one!

Make sure to mention the following information to help us provide better
support:

  • The BalenaEtcher version you're running.

  • The operating system you're running Etcher in.

  • Relevant logging output, if any, from DevTools, which you can open by
    pressing Ctrl+Shift+I or Cmd+Alt+I depending on your platform.

GitHub

If you encounter an issue or have a suggestion, head on over to BalenaEtcher's issue
tracker and if there isn't a ticket covering it, create
one.

File: docs/USER-DOCUMENTATION.md

Etcher User Documentation

This document contains how-tos and FAQs oriented to Etcher users.

Config

Etcher's configuration is saved to the config.json file in the apps folder.
Not all the options are surfaced to the UI. You may edit this file to tweak settings even before launching the app.

Why is my drive not bootable?

Etcher copies images to drives byte by byte, without doing any transformation
to the final device, which means images that require special treatment to be
made bootable, like Windows images, will not work out of the box. In these
cases, the general advice is to use software specific to those kind of
images, usually available from the image publishers themselves.

Images known to require special treatment:

How can I configure persistent storage?

Some programs, usually oriented at making GNU/Linux live USB drives, include an
option to set persistent storage. This is currently not supported by Etcher, so
if you require this functionality, we advise to fallback to
UNetbootin.

Deactivate desktop shortcut prompt on GNU/Linux

This is a feature provided by AppImages, where the applications
prompts the user to automatically register a desktop shortcut to easily access
the application.

To deactivate this feature, touch any of the files listed below:

  • $HOME/.local/share/appimagekit/no_desktopintegration
  • /usr/share/appimagekit/no_desktopintegration
  • /etc/appimagekit/no_desktopintegration

Alternatively, set the SKIP environment variable before executing the
AppImage:

sh
SKIP=1 ./Etcher-linux-<arch>.AppImage

Flashing Ubuntu ISOs

Ubuntu images (and potentially some other related GNU/Linux distributions) have
a peculiar format that allows the image to boot without any further
modification from both CDs and USB drives.

A consequence of this enhancement is that some programs, like parted get
confused about the drive's format and partition table, printing warnings such
as:

/dev/xxx contains GPT signatures, indicating that it has a GPT table.
However, it does not have a valid fake msdos partition table, as it should.
Perhaps it was corrupted -- possibly by a program that doesn't understand GPT
partition tables. Or perhaps you deleted the GPT table, and are now using an
msdos partition table. Is this a GPT partition table? Both the primary and
backup GPT tables are corrupt. Try making a fresh table, and using Parted's
rescue feature to recover partitions.

Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes,
but Linux says it is 512 bytes.

All these warnings are safe to ignore, and your drive should be able to
boot without any problems.

Refer to the following message from Ubuntu's mailing
list if
you want to learn more.

Running on Wayland

Electron is based on Gtk2, which can't run natively on Wayland. Fortunately,
the XWayland Server provides backwards compatibility to run any X
client on Wayland, including Etcher.

This usually works out of the box on mainstream GNU/Linux distributions that
properly support Wayland. If it doesn't, make sure the xwayland.so module is
being loaded by declaring it in your weston.ini:

text
[core]
modules=xwayland.so

Runtime GNU/Linux dependencies

This entry aims to provide an up to date list of runtime dependencies needed to
run Etcher on a GNU/Linux system.

Electron specific

See brightray's gyp file

  • gtk+-2.0
  • dbus-1
  • x11
  • xi
  • xcursor
  • xdamage
  • xrandr
  • xcomposite
  • xext
  • xfixes
  • xrender
  • xtst
  • xscrnsaver
  • gmodule-2.0
  • nss

Optional dependencies:

  • libnotify (for notifications)
  • libspeechd (for text-to-speech)

Etcher specific:

  • liblzma (for xz decompression)

Recovering broken drives

Sometimes, things might go wrong, and you end up with a half-flashed drive that
is unusable by your operating systems, and common graphical tools might even
refuse to get it back to a normal state.

To solve these kinds of problems, we've collected a list of fail-proof methods
to completely erase your drive in major operating systems.

Windows

In Windows, we'll use diskpart, a command line utility tool that comes
pre-installed in all modern Windows versions.

  • Open cmd.exe from either the list of all installed applications, or from
    the "Run..." dialog usually accessible by pressing Ctrl+X.

  • Type diskpart.exe and press "Enter". You'll be asked to provide
    administrator permissions, and a new prompt window will appear. The following
    commands should be run in the new window.

  • Run list disk to list the available drives. Take note of the number id that
    identifies the drive you want to clean.

  • Run select disk N, where N corresponds to the id from the previous step.

  • Run clean. This command will completely clean your drive by erasing any
    existent filesystem.

  • Run create partition primary. This command will create a new partition.

  • Run active. This command will active the partition.

  • Run list partition. This command will show available partition.

  • Run select partition N, where N corresponds to the id of the newly available partition.

  • Run format override quick. This command will format the partition. You can choose a specific formatting by adding FS=xx where xx could be NTFS or FAT or FAT32 after format. Example : format FS=NTFS override quick

  • Run exit to quit diskpart.

OS X

Run the following command in Terminal.app, replacing N by the corresponding
disk number, which you can find by running diskutil list:

sh
diskutil eraseDisk FAT32 UNTITLED MBRFormat /dev/diskN

GNU/Linux

Make sure the drive is unmounted (umount /dev/xxx), and run the following
command as root, replacing xxx by your actual device path:

sh
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1 conv=notrunc

"No polkit authentication agent found" error in GNU/Linux

Etcher requires an available polkit authentication
agent in
your system in order to show a secure password prompt dialog to perform
elevation. Make sure you have one installed for the desktop environment of your
choice.

Running in older macOS versions

Etcher GUI is based on the Electron framework, which only supports
macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) and newer versions.

See PUBLISHING for more details about release types.

2. Official Technical Reference & Guides (balena-io/docs)

balenaCloud Documentation

Documentation for the balenaCloud platform lives here.
Join our forums to chat.

This repo intends to provide our public-facing documentation. The documentation in this repo is hosted at https://docs.balena.io.

How to Contribute

If you think something is not documented, is outdated, or can be improved, don't hesitate to open a PR! Check our CONTRIBUTING document for the guidelines to ensure your PR can be merged as quickly as possible.
One can open or check existing issues on GitHub issues. Looking forward to seeing your contributions!

Pro tip: Use the "Edit on GitHub" button to make changes to the correct file. It can be found via the dropdown by the Ask button

Style manual

Balena-specific words

For all instances, we use balena as lower-case capitalization unless beginning a sentence (Ex. I like balena. Balena is great.). More instances as follows,

  • balena (used to refer to the company as a whole, not in place of balenaCloud, balenaOS or any other project)
  • balenaEtcher
  • balenaOS (note the capitalization of OS)
  • balenaEngine
  • balenaFin
  • balenaCloud
  • the balena CLI
  • the balena Supervisor
  • openbalena

Using Resuable Content

When creating new content or altering current pages, it's recommended to try and keep things DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). This is accomplished in the balenaCloud documentation by using "reusable content". The /pages/.gitbook/includes folder contain snippets of the docs, which can be reused anywhere in the documentation.

To use reusable content in a page, all you need to do is add the following onto the page:

text
{% include "../../../.gitbook/includes/balena-example-projects.md" %}

Warning: You are not able to link to headings in reusable content.

License

The project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

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