Installing Red on Raspberry Pi OS 12 Bookworm

We support hosting Red on computers running an aarch64 or armv7l version of this system.

You can read more about systems and processor architectures we support in our End-user Guarantees.

Note

This guide can only be used with Raspberry Pi OS 12 Bookworm, it will not work with any older (e.g. Raspberry Pi OS 11 Bullseye) or newer (e.g. Raspberry Pi OS 13 Trixie) releases. You can check your version of Raspberry Pi OS by running:

lsb_release -a

Warning

For safety reasons, DO NOT install Red with a root user. If you are unsure how to create a new user on Linux, see DigitalOcean’s tutorial: How To Create a New Sudo-enabled User.

Installing the pre-requirements

Raspberry Pi OS “Bookworm” has all required packages available in official repositories. Install them with apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install python3 python3-dev python3-venv git openjdk-17-jre-headless build-essential nano

Creating a Virtual Environment

Tip

If you want to learn more about virtual environments, see page: About Virtual Environments

We require installing Red into a virtual environment. Don’t be scared, it’s very straightforward.

Using `venv`

This is the quickest way to get your virtual environment up and running, as venv is shipped with python.

First, choose a directory where you would like to create your virtual environment. It’s a good idea to keep it in a location which is easy to type out the path to. From now, we’ll call it redenv and it will be located in your home directory.

Create your virtual environment with the following command:

python3.11 -m venv ~/redenv

And activate it with the following command:

source ~/redenv/bin/activate

Important

You must activate the virtual environment with the above command every time you open a new shell to run, install or update Red.

Installing Red

Choose one of the following commands to install Red.

To install without additional config backend support:

python -m pip install -U pip wheel
python -m pip install -U Red-DiscordBot

Or, to install with PostgreSQL support:

python -m pip install -U pip wheel
python -m pip install -U "Red-DiscordBot[postgres]"

Setting Up and Running Red

After installation, set up your instance with the following command:

redbot-setup

This will set the location where data will be stored, as well as your storage backend and the name of the instance (which will be used for running the bot).

Once done setting up the instance, run the following command to run Red:

redbot <your instance name>

It will walk through the initial setup, asking for your token and a prefix. You can find out how to obtain a token with this guide.

Tip

If it’s the first time you’re using Red, you should check our Getting started guide that will walk you through all essential information on how to interact with Red.