Unifi Controller on a Raspberry Pi

I wanted to repurpose my old Raspberry Pi 2 into something useful, as its age is showing and can’t be used for anything complicated these days. One of the things it can do just fine is manage a small home or office Ubiquiti-based network.

I’ve already written about setting up a Raspberry Pi, and while that guide is quite old it still holds true, just with newer versions of everything (e.g. release=buster instead of jessie).

Let’s get right into it.

Installation

Before we do anything, make sure we’re all up to date on software:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt autoremove -y
sudo apt autoclean -y
sudo reboot

With that out of the way, the first thing we need to do is install a newer Java runtime than the default, as the Oracle version available in the default repositories is too old for the Unifi software.

sudo apt install -y openjdk-8-jre-headless

We’ll also want to install something to speed up any actions that require randomness, as a Raspberry Pi can’t generate entropy fast enough because it has no mouse or keyboard to generate it from.

sudo apt install -y haveged

Getting right into it, we’ll add the Ubiquiti repositories and add their GPG keys for verifiying the package signatures.

sudo apt install -y apt-transport-https
echo 'deb https://www.ui.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubnt-unifi.list
sudo curl -sSL https://dl.ui.com/unifi/unifi-repo.gpg -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/unifi-repo.gpg

We can now finally install the Unifi Controller Software:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y unifi

After everything is installed, the Unifi software should be running automatically, and you’ll be able to visit it at https://<rpi-ip>:8443!

Bonus: Reverse proxy

We’ll want to visit the webgui on a standard port like 443 instead of 8443, and also get valid certificates to boot! For this we’ll use the fantastic software Caddy, which recently had its 2nd major release.

As with the Unifi software we’ll need to add their repositories first.

echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://apt.fury.io/caddy/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/caddy-fury.list

With that in place we can install Caddy:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y caddy

To set up Caddy, all we need to do is replace the contents of the configuration file, found at /etc/caddy/Caddyfile using your favorite terminal editor (e.g. vim or nano).

unifi.example.com

reverse_proxy https://localhost:8443 {
	transport http {
		tls_insecure_skip_verify
	}
}

Then restart the Caddy service and it should work:

sudo systemctl restart caddy