Installing Ubiquiti Unifi Controller on a Raspberry Pi

Just got my new Ubiquity Unifi gear at home and i need to install the controller software. The first option that came to mind is a Raspberry Pi, sporting Raspbian ‘Stretch’.

Updating Raspbian

To get the apt-key command successfully downloading the Ubiquity GPG-key on Raspbian Stretch, you need to install the dirmngr manually. Don’t forget to update the repository first!

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install dirmngr

Please note: APT-KEY is deprecated and this isn’t a final solution but merely a workaround.

Preparing Raspbian sources list

Adding the Unifi repository to the sources list

echo 'deb http://www.ubnt.com/downloads/unifi/debian unifi5 ubiquiti' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubnt.list > /dev/null

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv C0A52C50

sudo apt-get update

Installing the Unifi controller software

sudo apt-get install unifi -y

Disable the default MongoDB

echo 'ENABLE_MONGODB=no' | sudo tee -a /etc/mongodb.conf > /dev/null

Install Oracle Java 8

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-jdk -y

sudo cp /lib/systemd/system/unifi.service /etc/systemd/system/

sudo sed -i '/^\[Service\]$/a Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-arm32-vfp-hflt' /etc/systemd/system/unifi.service

Reboot your Pi

sudo reboot

After the reboot you can HTTPS to port 8443 on your Raspberry Pi:

https://[raspberrypi]:8443