Packaging the WiringPi library for Raspbian

A lot of our recent projects have used the excellent WiringPi library to talk to the Pi's electronics from software. A small frustration in this process has been the library's lack of integration into Raspbian... So I've written the code needed to do this, and made it available from GitHub.

The Pi's default operating system, Raspbian, is a version of Debian¹, and has a very powerful system for distributing software and software updates. This system uses .deb files containing packaged versions of software, and it was the means to create one of these that was missing for WiringPi.

Now you can install WiringPi without having to download or compile it, like this:

  wget https://raw.github.com/hamishcunningham/wiringpi/master/package/2.13/unstable/wiringpi_2.13_armhf.deb
  sudo dpkg -i ./wiringpi_2.13_armhf.deb

Hopefully Gordon will find time to pull my changes into his own repository and pass the package on to the Raspbian people one of these days, which will make the process even easier.

Gordon also has lots of good examples and reference materials on his site, like this Blink project:

Well worth a visit!

Read the main article.

Footnotes

To be picky, the Pi's default operating system's full title would be the Raspbian distribution of Debian GNU Linux.