Installing the Python Azure SDK on a Raspberry Pi Zero

Pi Zero with camera module

Holiday Project

This summer holiday I'm working on a hobby project which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Pi camera module. Part of the solution is uploading the pictures the Pi takes to the cloud, Microsoft Azure to be more specific. I plan to write a couple of blog posts about this project. This first post is about installing the Azure SDK on the Pi Zero.

Python and Azure

Raspbian Jessie, the Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi already has Python pre-installed and since Microsoft provides an Azure SDK for Python I decided to write an application in Python which will capture and upload the images to Azure.

Errors when installing the Azure SDK

When I tried installing the Azure SDK (v2.0.0) using:

sudo pip install azure

I got some error messages such as:

Expected version spec in', 'azure-batch ~=3.0.0'
fatal error: ffi.h: No such file or directory
fatal error: openssl/opensslv.h: No such file or directory

Apparently the Python environment on my Pi Zero was out of date and missing some libraries. These were the steps I took to get to a successful installation of the Azure SDK:

Update pip: sudo pip install --upgrade pip
Install libffi: sudo apt-get install libffi-dev
Install libssl: sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Clean up

Since I want to keep my SD card as clean as possible I cleared the cached Python packages located in /var/cache/apt/archives by running this command:

sudo apt-get clean

In the next blog post I'll show which Azure services I'm using and how I configured them.