Set up a Raspberry Pi Zero headless

By Leo Gaggl

August 20, 2017

If you are using the GUI (Raspian full download) and want to connect your RPi Zero to a keyboard and monitor there are probably easier ways to do this. These notes are for people that want to use a headless (no monitor and GUI) setup ready to connect to your RPi after first boot via SSH from another terminal.

wget -O raspbian-lite-latest.zip https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_lite_latest

Download link: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Write Image to SD Card

dd bs=4M if=2017-08-16-raspbian-stretch-lite.img of=/dev/sdb

After this step there should be 2 additional mounts (if not mount the 2 SD card partitions manually).

Set up network interfaces

Create a new config file for the wireless interface.

cd etc/network/interfaces.d/ vim wlan0.conf

Add the following to the new file (if you want to use DHCP – change to static if you want to fix the IP):

auto wlan0 allow-hotplug wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Set up connection details for local wireless network

vim etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Check the file and ensure the network settings are as per the Wireless Network you are connecting to.

country=AU ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev update_config=1 network={ ssid="SSID" psk=HASHED_PSK_VALUE }

You could use the clear-text PSK passphrase but I prefer not to do that in configuration files. Create a PSK hash using ‘wpa_passphrase‘ this older article

There could be other config values you might need depending on the network you are connecting to. More info: https://linux.die.net/man/5/wpa_supplicant.conf.

Ensure there are DNS Servers configured

sudo vim etc/resolv.conf

Add the following to the new file (or your own nameservers):

# Google's public DNS servers nameserver 8.8.8.8 nameserver 8.8.4.4

Enable SSH Access

Create an ssh empty file in the mounted boot partition. This is necessary to enable SSH access as SSH is by default disabled on more recent versions of Raspbian.

cd boot/ sudo touch ssh

Boot RPi

Boot the Rpi by powering up and after ~30secs you should be able to connect to the IP assigned. Check your router or ise ‘nmap’ or similar to check the assigned IP:

sudo nmap -p22 -sV 10.1.1.0/24

Default login details are
UID: pi
PWD: rasbperry

My normal further setup steps for RPi 3 are here.

EDIT [2017-08-21]: One of the things necessary on later RPi’s is to turn off power saving mode on the WLAN interface.

sudo iw dev wlan0 set power_save off