How to setup headless Raspberry Pi

This guide will get you through installing, configuring, and running Raspberry Pi in headless mode (i.e., without a monitor or

Download the Raspberry Pi OS image

You can download the Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) image here. I recommend the Lite version.

Copy the image to an SD card

If you’re using a Chromebook, I recommend the Chromebook Recovery Utility with its “Use local image” option.

Normally, you’d insert the SD card into your Pi now and continue set up with a keyboard and monitor, but since we’re doing headless, we have a few extra steps.

Configure WiFi

This is only required if you’re using WiFi. If you’re using a wired Ethernet connection, you can skip this step.

Create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf to your boot partition with the following contents, replacing the country, ssid and psk values with your own. Two-letter country codes can be found here.

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=US

network={
  ssid="<YOUR WIFI NAME>"
  psk="<YOUR WIFI PASSWORD>"
}

If you don’t want to use your plaintext WiFi password, you can use the wpa_passphrase to generate a PSK.

$ wpa_passphrase my_ssid
# reading passphrase from stdin
P@ssw0rd!
network={
        ssid="my_ssid"
        #psk="P@ssw0rd!"
        psk=7bd9400bdeab430431b34fd463df8287ed93875aa56bae7d5e703388f647082f
}

Enable SSH

Create an empty file called ssh to the root of the boot partition of your newly imaged SD card.

Boot up your Pi

Eject your SD card from your computer and install it into the Pi and turn it on. Give it a few minutes to boot up and check your router’s DHCP table for the Pi’s address. You should now be able to SSH in with default credentials pi:raspberry.