rpi-headless-setup.md

Headless Raspberry Pi Setup

Make a startup disk

Download a Raspberry Pi OS or another OS of your choice. To create the startup disk, use dd or a startup disk creator, like Ubuntu's conveniently named Startup Disk Creator or balenaEtcher.

Configure Networking

Following this guide, create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf in the boot folder of your microSD card with this:

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

network={
 ssid="<Name of your wireless LAN>"
 psk="<Password for your wireless LAN>"
}

Note the newline at the top (not sure if this is necessary, but the Raspberry Pi guide says it might be).

Enable SSH

Following this guide, simply create an empty file named ssh in the boot folder of your microSD. That's it!

Find your PI's IP address

See this guide.

SSH!

Now you can simply access your Pi from the convenience of your own computer:

ssh pi@<pi-IP>

The default Raspberry Pi password is raspberry.

Moving files between the Pi and your computer

This can be done with scp or rsync.

For example,

scp <source>:/path/to/file <dest>:/destination/path

or

scp -r <source>:/path/to/directory <dest>:/destination/path