Setup a Print Server using Raspberry Pi & CUPS: Part 1

Having a print server has various advantages. Print server can connect multiple computers to a single or multiple printers wired or wirelessly, you can access your printer with multiple devices and can send print commands from any of the connected devices to the printer.

It is often quite difficult to use Android phones to print to a wired printer, but a print server makes it easy. A print server can be beneficial for small offices, where a person can easily print to any of the office printers. Another advantage is that we need not install the printer drivers on any of our devices.

Introduction to CUPS

CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is a printing system for UNIX like operating systems based computers. It gives computers on which it is running the ability to act as a print server. A computer running CUPS is able to accept jobs from multiple devices, process them and pass it on to the appropriate printer to print. For this tutorial, we will setup CUPS on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. You can use any other Raspberry Pi model.

Requirements

1. Raspberry Pi
2. SD Card (At least 8GB) and SD Card Reader
3. USB Printer
4. Ethernet Cable (optional if your Pi supports Wi-Fi)
5. Power Supply

Installing Operating System on SD Card

To setup our print server, we need an Operating System that will run on our raspberry Pi. If you are already ready with an OS on you SD card, you can skip to Part 2. For this article, we will use Raspberry Pi OS with desktop (Latest at the time of writing).

Note that all the contents in your SD card will be wiped.

1. Download the latest “Raspberry Pi OS with desktop” zip file from here.

2. Unzip the downloaded file to get the .img OS image file.

3. Download and install Etcher. Etcher is a multi platform tool that can flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

4. Insert your SD Card in Card Reader. Plug the card reader to the PC.

5. Open Etcher and select the extracted image file. Select your SD Card and click Flash. This will start writing the OS on the SD Card.

6. After completion of writing, safely remove the SD Card from the reader.

Setting Up Raspberry Pi

We need to setup our raspberry pi before we setup our print server. You can either do a normal setup (connecting monitor, keyboard and mouse to your Pi) or a headless setup (using ssh or vnc). If you are familiar with using ssh, you can perform a headless setup. For this article, we will perform a normal setup.

1. Connect Pi to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Plug the SD card to the Pi.
2. Turn on the power supply. Wait for about two minutes until the OS boots.

3. Complete the on-screen initial setup: setting the keyboard language, connecting to wireless network, setting the password for the regular user account pi, and setting the password for the system administrator account root.

Initial Setup

4. We need to ensure that our pi has all the latest updates to the OS. To do this, open a terminal window.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Finally reboot your Pi

sudo reboot

This completes the first part of our setup. We now have a fully functional raspberry pi. Click here for next part, where we will setup our print server.