Setup a Raspberry Pi Kiosk in Minutes with FullPageOS

Have you ever wanted a display in your home that plays your favorite pictures or videos on repeat, or shows a dashboard you check regularly? If you have a Raspberry Pi, setting up this display is easier than ever with FullPageOS. Here’s how you can do it.

FullPageOS can be directly flashed onto an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager. After that, image, video, or custom website links can be set up to be displayed on the Raspberry Pi on boot.

You get a big full-screen website opened on a browser window without hassles. Cool, right? Let’s start by knowing a bit more about FullPageOS.

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What is FullPageOS and a Kiosk?

A kiosk is a display (whether interactive or not) that shows things like advertisements, images, videos, or information. It’s generally used for advertising in public places so that the customers and people visiting get to know more about the services or products available.

A Raspberry Pi is a very cost-effective and ideal choice for powering this kiosk. There are numerous software available specifically for this purpose. Some of them have already been covered on RaspberryTips:

• Installing DAKboard on Raspberry Pi (Customizable Displays)
• Install Anthias by Screenly on Raspberry Pi (Digital signage)
• Getting Started with Apertis on Raspberry Pi (embedded system for touchscreen)

However, if you want to display some images or a webpage, setting these up would be overkill. That is where FullPageOS comes to your rescue! You can set everything up in minutes and still get a nice, working personal display for yourself or your business.

Let’s start with the actual tutorial now. For the requirements, all you will need is the following:

• Raspberry Pi – Good News! You will need a Raspberry Pi 2 or newer model (unfortunately, the Pi Zero isn’t supported). I suggest using a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 2 GB RAM, which is what I used.
• PC with an SD card reader – It can be a Raspberry Pi with Imager on it.
  You can use an inexpensive USB adapter if you don’t have one (like this one on Amazon).
• Micro-SD card – To install the latest Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi.
  Here is my current recommendation for the best performance, but any model will do for this tutorial as it aims to show you how to install and setup Tailscale on your Pi.
• Monitor or Display – You should have a display on which you can display the webpage or images you set up. Moreover, if you want to interact with your webpage, you need a keyboard and mouse connected to your Pi.
• Raspberry Pi Imager – We’ll use this software to flash FullPageOS onto our SD card.

Great! Now that we are all squared up, let’s start with the actual installation steps.

FullPageOS Installation Instructions

There are no custom installation steps we need to perform as FullPageOS is available as an option on Raspberry Pi Imager. All you need to do is select it, and you’re good to go! Cool, right? Let’s start the process.

Note: If you don’t want to use Imager for some reason, you can still visit the official FullPageOS GitHub to download and flash it manually.

Flashing FullPageOS onto an SD Card

Let me walk you through the process of flashing FullPageOS using Raspberry Pi Imager:

• Launch Raspberry Pi Imager.
  (If you don’t have it yet, download Imager here.)
  
• Device – Choose your Raspberry Pi model. For this guide, I’ll choose the Raspberry Pi 4.
  
  
• OS – Scroll to the bottom and select Other specific-purpose OS.
  
• Next, choose Digital signage and kiosks and then select FullPageOS.
  
• This will open the final window which shows the OS options. You will see both the stable and nightly versions for the OS. For this tutorial, let’s stick with the stable version so that there are no surprises.
  
• Once you have selected the OS, insert your SD card, and click the NEXT button.
  
• Storage – Select your SD card from the list of available choices.
  
• Customisation – If you need Wi-Fi, I highly recommend setting it here, as it’s easier.
  Otherwise, you can click the SKIP CUSTOMISATION button.
  (For more details, check out our full guide: Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Imager.
  
• Writing – You’ll get a summary of your options. Click WRITE to begin.
  You’ll get a warning that everything on this SD card will be erased. Confirm.
  

This will start the flashing process. It will take a few minutes to complete so be patient. Once the process is complete, the SD card automatically ejects from your system.

With this, we have successfully set up our SD card for the Raspberry Pi. Next, let’s see what setup steps we need for this OS (trust me, it’s very little).

First Steps with FullPageOS

Before you add this SD card to your Pi, there are some things you need to set up: what website to show or what image/video to display on your display! You have two options: directly set it up from your main system or use SSH. We will keep things simple and use our PC to complete this.

There are two main steps involved in the pre-boot setup process:

• Setting up a Wi-Fi connection
• First Boot

So, let’s start.

Setup Wi-Fi Connection

Note: You can skip this section if you’ve already set up your Wi-Fi earlier using Raspberry Pi Imager. I recommend doing it that way when possible.

We will set up the Pi to connect to our Wi-Fi network so that we have to option to SSH into our system in case we need to (as there is no user interface you can use to set up things).

• First, reinsert your SD card into the card slot (you might need to remove and reinsert) so it shows up as a boot drive on your system.
  
  
• Locate the file named fullpageos-wpa-supplicant.txt and open it in an editor of your choice (I suggest VS Code or Sublime Text).
  
  
• Next, we will modify the network section and enter our Wi-Fi credentials instead of the default text.
  Enter your Wi-Fi network name in ssid and password in the psk section.
  
  
• Once you have completed this, save the file and that’s it.

You have successfully set up your Pi’s Wi-Fi connectivity settings. When your Pi boots, it will connect to your configured network.

First Boot

If you boot FullPageOS without modifying anything, you should see the default webpage that they’ve set as shown below (Note that the first boot will take some time, so be patient).

Scanning the link will take you to the documentation page which shows how to set up links in FullPageOS. Here is the documentation for your reference.

That’s it! You have FullPageOS running on your Pi.

Now, let’s see how to make configuration changes to change what we see on our display.

Customize your Website View

This section will cover the different customizations for your Pi’s display with FullPageOS. In particular, we will mainly focus on these two options:

• Displaying a Website/Dashboard
• Displaying a Video

Before we start with the above options, let’s see how we can SSH into our Pi running FullPageOS to make our lives easier (we won’t have to unplug the SD card every time we want to make changes).

SSH Access

SSH access for the Pi lets you access the OS via a terminal window on your main computer. Here is the link to my tutorial where I go into the details of SSH on a Raspberry Pi.

For FullPageOS, the good news is that SSH is enabled by default.

So, once you start the Pi, you can connect to it with a computer or device on the same network as your Pi. Here are all the details you will need to establish an SSH connection.

• Address: fullpageos.local (you can also use your Pi’s IP Address if you know it).
• Username: pi
• Password: raspberry (I highly recommend you change it for security).

Note: If you’ve already set the username/password earlier with Raspberry Pi Imager, then use those login credentials instead.

Once you open a terminal, all you need to do is execute the following command:
ssh [email protected]
and use the default password to establish an SSH connection.

You will be able to make configuration changes without removing your SD card.

So, let’s start with the first option of setting up a website to be displayed on your screen on boot.

Tip: Command lines can be a pain to memorize. I put the essential Linux commands on a printable cheat sheet so you don't have to keep googling them. You can grab the PDF here if you want to save some time.

Option 1: Display a Custom Website/Dashboard

In most cases, if you want an interactive display, you will want to display your favorite or most visited website. Or if you have a smart device, you would want a digital dashboard of it available at all times. In any case, you will have to follow the steps given below:

• From the terminal where you SSH’ed into your Pi, go into the /boot/firmware directory and locate the file named fullpageos.txt as we will make our configuration changes in that. You can use the following commands:
  cd /boot/firmware
ls -l full*
  
  
  
• Open that file for editing:
  sudo nano fullpageos.txt
  
• Replace the existing link with the website you would like to to show on your display.
  You can copy the link you want and paste it into the editor using CTRL+SHIFT+V.
  (The site needs to be accessible through the public internet.)
  
  
• Save & exit (CTRL+X).
  (I have a tutorial for nano here if you want to know more of the commands.)
  
• That is all! Easy, right? Now, you can restart the Pi from the terminal or just unplug it and then power it again so that our display shows the updated website.
  
  
• Alternatively, you can set up a dashboard to be displayed on this screen. All you need to do is change the link in the text file to point to your dashboard (something like this).
  

Option 2: Display a Video

Now, let’s see how to display a video (in full screen) on our display. It may seem a bit complex, but don’t worry, we will go step-by-step so that the process isn’t overwhelming.

• For this, the first step is to get the URL for the video you want to play on your PiDisplay (it has a nice ring to it, right?).
• I will choose one of my YouTube videos for this tutorial.
  Open the video and then you should see the link for it in your address bar.
  
  The link should be something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6sNzmO4pwY.
  
  
  
• However, one thing to note is opening this link opens the YouTube platform, not the full-screen video. For that, we will need to make some changes to this link. Here is what the final link should look like:
  
  
  You can grab the unique ID for your video from the above image and add the additional options by adding a “?” after the link. For now, I have added the autoplay and video quality options. If you want to show a video in some landscape, you can even add the mute option which disables sound (add mute=1).
  
• Once you have your video link, paste it into your fullpageos.txt file and save.
  Then follow the same process. Your video should automatically start playing.

This marks the end of this tutorial. You now know how to use FullPageOS, including everything from installation to configuring how to show different web pages and videos on your FullPageOS Pi display. Thanks for reading—see you in the next one!

Whenever you’re ready, here are other ways I can help you:

Test Your Raspberry Pi Level (Free): Not sure why everything takes so long on your Raspberry Pi? Take this free 3-minute assessment and see what’s causing the problems.

The RaspberryTips Community: Need help or want to discuss your Raspberry Pi projects with others who actually get it? Join the RaspberryTips Community and get access to private forums, exclusive lessons, and direct help.

Master your Raspberry Pi in 30 days: If you are looking for the best tips to become an expert on Raspberry Pi, this book is for you. Learn useful Linux skills and practice multiple projects with step-by-step guides.

Master Python on Raspberry Pi: Create, understand, and improve any Python script for your Raspberry Pi. Learn the essentials step-by-step without losing time understanding useless concepts.

You can also find all my recommendations for tools and hardware on this page.