012_install_and_enable_software_management.md

Install and enable the software management feature

Note: As of now, this feature is supported only on devices with debian based distributions, which use the apt package manager(Ex: RaspberryPi OS , Ubuntu, Debian), from Cumulocity cloud.

Below steps show how to download, install and enable thin-edge software management feature.

Download and install software management packages on the device

As a prerequisite, install tedge and tedge_mapper if not installed already.

The thin-edge software management packages are in repository on GitHub: thin-edge.io.

To download the package from github repository use the following command (use desired version):

curl -LJO https://github.com/thin-edge/thin-edge.io/releases/download/<package>_<version>_<arch>.deb

where:

version -> thin-edge.io software management components version in x.x.x format

arch -> architecture type (amd64, armhf)

Download tedge_apt_plugin and tedge_agent

curl -LJO https://github.com/thin-edge/thin-edge.io/releases/download/0.5.0/tedge_apt_plugin_0.5.0_armhf.deb
curl -LJO https://github.com/thin-edge/thin-edge.io/releases/download/0.5.0/tedge_agent_0.5.0_armhf.deb

Once the packages are downloaded, proceed to installation.

To install tedge_apt_plugin and tedge_agent on thin-edge device do:

sudo dpkg -i tedge_apt_plugin_<version>_<arch>.deb
sudo dpkg -i tedge_agent<version>_<arch>.deb

Note: Software management feature will be enabled after installation if the device is connected to the Cumulocity cloud using tedge connect c8y.

Start and enable the software management feature

Using tedge connect c8y

The tedge connect c8y will automatically start and enable the software management feature. Find more about how to connect thin-edge device to cloud

Once the thin-edge device is successfully connected to Cumulocity cloud, the Software option will be enabled and the list of softwares that are installed on the device will be visible as shown in the figure below.

Note: Disconnecting thin-edge device from cloud with tedge disconnect c8y command will stop and disable the software management feature.

Manually enabling and disabling software management feature

For debugging purpose or to disable/enable the software management services, one can start/stop manually as shown below.

Starting the services

sudo systemctl start tedge-agent.service
sudo systemctl start tedge-mapper-c8y.service

Stopping the services

sudo systemctl stop tedge-agent.service
sudo systemctl stop tedge-mapper-c8y.service