Purpose of This Repository

The Armbian SDK publishes ready-to-deploy Armbian virtual images preloaded with the toolchain, source repositories, and dependencies needed to develop on the Armbian platform — drop one onto a cloud provider, Proxmox, or any QEMU/KVM-capable hypervisor and start building immediately.

Daily builds from this repository's GitHub Action target uefi-x86 and uefi-arm64 on Ubuntu Noble and Debian Trixie with the cloud kernel, published as raw .img.xz and .img.qcow2.

Looking for SBC images? Use Armbian Imager — these images are virtual machines, not SBC images.

Quick Start

Download a .img.qcow2 from the latest release and boot it under any QEMU/KVM-capable hypervisor.

• Default credentials: armbian / armbian (configured in userpatches/firstboot.conf)
• code-server (browser-based VS Code) on port 8443
• Build framework checked out at ~/workspace/build

What's Inside

• Curated source tree pre-cloned into the code-server workspace at /armbian/code-server/config/workspace/ (linked at ~/workspace for shell users): build, configng, documentation, website, imager.
• Build dependencies pre-installed (./compile.sh requirements already ran in the rootfs) — the first build skips the apt phase.
• code-server installed on first boot via armbian-config --api module_code-server install, with the Python extension (ms-python.python) pre-installed and the Claude Code CLI available in the integrated terminal.
• SSH ready out of the box: maintainer's GitHub public keys baked into both root and the armbian user via Armbian's PRESET_*_KEY firstboot mechanism.
• Asset manifest at a stable URL for programmatic consumption: https://github.com/armbian/sdk/releases/latest/download/armbian-images.json.

How It's Built

The GitHub Action drives a {board} × {release} × {extension} matrix through the armbian/build composite action. Each cell runs the build chroot's customize-image.sh (clones, build deps, key seeding) and stages provisioning.sh for first boot (code-server install, extension provisioning, ownership handover). After the matrix completes, an aggregator job merges per-image manifests into a single armbian-images.json and promotes the release from pre-release to latest.

Resources

• Armbian Documentation — Building, configuring, and customizing
• Armbian Build Framework — The framework this SDK targets
• Website — News, features, and board information
• Forums — Community support and discussions