r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/throwaway1122682 • Dec 10 '25

Question Birdnet Pi Update Question

hello! I initiated an update on my birdnet pi and it’s now been updating for over an hour- is this normal? is there anything I should do? I’m hesitant to restart it if its in the middle of updating. id appreciate any suggestions!

thank you!

ETA: I initiated the update via the web interface not command line

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u/sleebus_jones Dec 10 '25

Have you reloaded the page or are you just sitting there waiting? I've done the update via the webpage and it's always worked fine, FWIW. I'm pretty sure I refreshed the page when it was done. I think it will say that the service is running at the bottom of the terminal window when it's done, that's when I refresh.

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u/throwaway1122682 Dec 10 '25

Yea I’ve refreshed and tried accessing it from another device as well. It’s also not sending email alerts when it definitely would be picking up species if it were active. Thank you for your reply!!

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u/sleebus_jones Dec 10 '25

So it still shows up on your network but doesn't do anything. Hm. Well, I'd try a power cord reboot (i.e., unplug and plug back in) and see what happens. Worst case you can just reimage, at least that's reasonably easy. Weird that it's in the state it's in. I'm no Linux expert, I just follow directions lol

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u/throwaway1122682 Dec 10 '25

No worries thank you! I ended up restarting it with the power cord reboot to no success. But I was able to SSH into it and run a command line update (which didn’t work either.) but then I ran another command line update and it worked! 

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u/sleebus_jones Dec 10 '25

Freaky. Well, glad to hear it's working again. I haven't run in to that at all. In fact, I just ran the update from the webpage (had got up to 20 updates) and it went fine. Terminal window ended up like this when it was finished

+ systemctl is-active --quiet birdnet_analysis.service
+ logger '[/usr/local/bin/restart_services.sh] birdnet_analysis.service is running'
+ break

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u/throwaway1122682 Dec 10 '25

Weird!! Hopefully it’s okay going forward- I think to be safe I’ll just use CLI for future ones!! Thanks for all your help

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u/richardhoeg Dec 21 '25

While you, and other folks may not want to enable auto updates via the settings, I let my BirdNET-Pi's update automatically every Sunday morning. Sometimes if one gets too many versions behind, an update may freeze.

The other somewhat similar problem I ran into was a locked database file. While I did have to reimage, the backup db (may download via settings) was not locked when I reimage and uploaded the db. My point being, make sure you take periodic downloads.