Open-source digital signage · FreeBSD
Flash a cheap mini-PC and it boots straight into your web page, full-screen. Set it up from the screen. It updates and heals on its own — for years, on a wall.
The content is the product. The stick is just the delivery mechanism.
kioskage turns a throwaway mini-PC into a maintenance-free wall display: it boots to full-screen Chromium pointed at a URL you choose, with an on-screen setup flow so you never need a laptop at the wall.
It's the whole appliance, open-sourced — FreeBSD image, self-healing over-the-air updates, a setup portal, fleet keep-alive, and drop-in content tools you can use even without the stick. Bring your own content; kioskage carries it.
A stick owns nothing but the display. It pulls its code from the public repo and its brand from your private overlay, pulls its own content from your server — every display in a fleet can show a different page — and pings back a keep-alive so you can watch them all. Nothing phones home to us.
Only the sticks need to run FreeBSD. Your content server and the management hub can be anything — any web server for the content, any host with an SSH server for the tunnels. Linux, BSD, a container, or whatever you already run. We run FreeBSD on everything ourselves, but it isn't required.
Planned → a management server the sticks dial out to over reverse SSH (held open with autossh), so you can reach any display for maintenance even when it sits behind NAT on someone else's network.
Connect Wi-Fi or Ethernet and point it at your URL from the display itself — scan a QR from your phone, or use a keyboard. No laptop, no SSH.
Pulls nightly, health-checks the result, and automatically rolls back if an update fails to come up. The running revision is always one that passed.
Public code plus a small private overlay — your brand.conf, a logo, an optional portal — equals your fleet's identity. Nothing brand-specific in the code.
A drop-in service worker never shows a browser error page, keeps the last good render when the network drops, and reloads only when the content actually changes.
Each display tags its requests with its name and version, so one line of your access log tells you who's alive, on what build, and when it last checked in.
Password-gate the setup portal and validate a kiosk key against your content server. Boots read-only; the cursor hides; a physical factory-reset is the escape hatch.
kioskage runs on cheap mini-PCs — the kind you leave on a wall and forget. The two verified units are honestly overkill: FreeBSD plus Chromium is light, so the bar for anything else is low.
Verified today
Bring your own — the bar
On the radar — leaner & cheaper
Why FreeBSD on the sticks? A smaller footprint and a more unified distribution model than a typical Linux appliance. It should also port to NetBSD without much trouble — worth it if you want to run even leaner hardware.
Provision a mini-PC with the FreeBSD image from a USB stick. Boots from eMMC; card slots stay empty.
First boot shows a setup screen with a QR code and an address — the display hosts its own portal over a temporary hotspot.
Enter a kiosk key or a full URL. It goes full-screen, remembers everything, and starts on every boot from then on.
Full walkthrough → docs/INSTALL-FreeBSD.md
Even if you never touch the appliance, js/ makes any signage page well-behaved on an always-on screen: no error pages, change-only reloads, and fleet keep-alive. It's independent of the stick — drop it into a page you already have.
<script src="kioskage.js"></script> <script> kioskage.keepAlive({ host: "lobby" }); kioskage.reloadOnChange(); </script>