Is there a way to install a fully updated Raspbian directly from SD card (without needing to update when pi first boots)

Question

I'm working with a few Pi zeros and I'd rather not go out to buy accessories to connect them all to the internet but I want to update them to the newest version of Raspbian.

Is there any way to load a fully up to date version of Raspbian directly on the SD card from the get go, so that I don't need to run sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade on first boot for all of the Pis?

Answer 1

Here is how I'd go about it

1. write image to SD card that is exactly the same size or smaller than your target SD cards
2. boot this card in a pi
3. update/upgrade, and perform any other customisations you want/need
4. shutdown gracefully
5. add init=/usr/lib/raspi-config/init_resize.sh at the end of the first line in cmdline.txt (if you used a smaller SD card in step 1
6. create your new image from this SD card

Step 6 depends on your computer ... how do you do step 1? Does this process/program have a read image instead of write image function (win32disk image does)

if you use dd it's simple

to write, it's something like

dd if=raspbian.img of=/dev/someDeviceHere [other options]

to create an image, simply swap if/of

dd of=myraspbian.img if=/dev/someDeviceHere  [other options]

where [other options] are whatever else you use on the command line