apt stores a list of software sources in a file at /etc/apt/sources.list. Before installing software, run the following command to update your local list of packages using /etc/apt/sources.list:

Run the following command to upgrade all your installed packages to their latest versions:

Run these commands regularly to keep your software up-to-date. Using apt to keep Raspberry Pi OS up to date also keeps your Linux kernel and firmware up to date, since Raspberry Pi distributes them as Debian packages.

When Raspberry Pi releases a new major version of Raspberry Pi OS, the above commands won’t upgrade your operating system to that new major version. To upgrade to a new major version, follow our OS upgrade instructions.

To search the archives for a package, pass a search keyword to apt-cache search:

For example, consider the following search for the keyword "raspi":

The search returned multiple packages with names or descriptions that included the keyword.

Use the following command to view detailed information about a package:

For example, consider the following query for the "raspi-config" package:

Use this command to verify that the maintainer, version, and size match your expectations for a package.

To install a package on your Raspberry Pi, pass the name of the package to the following command:

apt will display the amount of disk space the package will consume. Enter Y and press Enter to confirm installation of the package. You can skip this confirmation step by adding the -y flag to the command above.

To uninstall a package from your Raspberry Pi, pass the name of the package to the following command:

apt will display the amount of disk space removing the package will free up. Enter Y and press Enter to confirm removal of the package. You can skip this confirmation step by adding the -y flag to the command above.

Before running, sudo apt full-upgrade shows the amount of data you’ll need to download and store on disk to complete an upgrade. To check that you have enough free disk space, run the following command:

apt stores downloaded package (.deb) files in /var/cache/apt/archives. During installation, apt downloads these packages, then copies files from the packages to the correct installation locations. Depending on the software you have installed, package files can take up significant amounts of space. To delete any lingering package files, run the following command:

To play an audio or video file from Raspberry Pi Desktop, double-click on a file in the file manager. This automatically launches VLC to play the file. Alternatively, from the Sound & Video menu, launch VLC Media Player. Then, from the Media menu, select Open File…​ and navigate to the file you want to play.

By default, Raspberry Pi OS sends audio to your monitor over HDMI. To output audio to a different interface, such as the headphone jack or USB speakers, right-click on the speaker icon in the system tray and select an option.

You can also launch VLC from the command line. For the examples below, we used a short clip from Big Buck Bunny. To download this clip from Raspberry Pi, run the following command:

To play the clip in VLC from the command line, run the following command:

To prevent the VLC GUI staying open after your file has finished playing, add the --play-and-exit flag:

To play a video in fullscreen mode (which can result in smoother playback in some circumstances), add the --fullscreen flag:

If you use cvlc instead of vlc with any of these commands, then the VLC GUI won’t be shown:

The vcos command has two useful sub-commands:

Displays the build date and version of the VideoCore firmware.

Returns the throttled state of the system. This is a bit pattern. A bit being set indicates the following meanings:

Returns the temperature of the SoC as measured by its internal temperature sensor. On Raspberry Pi 4, measure_temp pmic returns the temperature of the PMIC.

This returns the current frequency of the specified clock. Accepts the following clock values:

e.g. vcgencmd measure_clock arm

Displays the current voltages used by the specific block. Accepts the following block values:

Displays the content of the OTP (one-time programmable) memory inside the SoC. These are 32-bit values, indexed from 8 to 64. See the OTP bits page for more details.

Displays the value of the configuration setting specified: alternatively, specify either int (integer) or str (string) to see all configuration items of the given type. For example, the following command returns the total memory on the device in megabytes:

Reports on the amount of memory addressable by the Arm and the GPU. To show the amount of Arm-addressable memory, use vcgencmd get_mem arm; to show the amount of GPU-addressable memory, use vcgencmd get_mem gpu. On devices with more than 1GB of memory, the arm parameter will always return 1GB minus the gpu memory value, since the GPU firmware is only aware of the first 1GB of memory. To get an accurate report of the total memory on the device, see the total_mem configuration item and the get_config section above.

In older versions of Raspberry Pi OS, you could install libraries directly into the system version of Python using pip. Since Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, users cannot install libraries directly into the system version of Python.

Instead, install libraries into a virtual environment (venv). To install a library at the system level for all users, install it with apt.

Attempting to install a Python package system-wide outputs an error similar to the following:

Python users have long dealt with conflicts between OS package managers like apt and Python-specific package management tools like pip. These conflicts include both Python-level API incompatibilities and conflicts over file ownership.

Starting in Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, packages installed via pip must be installed into a Python virtual environment (venv). A virtual environment is a container where you can safely install third-party modules so they won’t interfere with your system Python.

To use a virtual environment, create a container to store the environment. There are several ways you can do this depending on how you want to work with Python: