First of all you you need to flash a copy of the Raspberry Pi OS (was Raspian) onto an SD card
For this guide on setting up a headless Raspberry Pi, we recommend that you use the Lite version of the operating system. The lite version of the OS does not come with the GUI, which is unneeded in a headless setup unless you are using remote desktop software.
Once you have written the Raspberry Pi OS to your SD Card, make sure you keep it connected to your device as we will need to add some additional files to it..
In the first section, we will show you how you can enable SSH without needing access to your Raspberry Pi’s interface.
We can do this by creating an empty file named ssh in the /boot folder of your SD Card.
Make sure when you create this file that you do not give it a file extension.
1. First, open the boot directory for your Raspberry Pi’s SD Card.
Within this SD card, create a file called “wpa_supplicant.conf” and begin editing it in your favorite text editor.
2. Within this file, we can enter the configuration details for our network.
Before we do this, you must first work out the 2 letter ISO 3166-1 country code.
As an example of a valid country code, the code for Australia is “AU“. For the United Kingdom, this code is “GB“, and for the United States, the country code is “US“.
In addition to the country code, you must also know the SSID and the password for the WiFi network you want to connect to.
3. Once you have the required information, go ahead and enter the following text into the file.
Make sure you fill in the correct information within this file. We have highlighted the sections that need you to fill in your information.
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=[WIFI COUNTRY CODE]
network={
ssid="[NETWORK SSID]"
psk="[NETWORK PASSWORD]"
}4. The Raspberry Pi OS detects that this file exists within the boot directory.
Once it detects the file, it copies it from the boot drive to the correct location on the root file system. It then uses these settings to start up the wireless network connection.
You may be wondering how you connect to your Raspberry Pi now that you have connected it to your network and have SSH enabled.
There are two possible ways to do this. The first is to try connecting to the raspberrypi hostname. The other way is to retrieve your Pi’s IP address.
To connect to the Raspberry Pi using the hostname, you can use raspberrypi or raspberrypi.local within the IP field of Putty or MobaXTerm.
Using the hostname does not always work, so there are times where you will need to get the IP address of your Raspberry Pi.