Setting up headless Raspberry Pi OS on macOS

Setting up headless Raspbian on macOS.md

Download the latest Raspbian Lite image from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/ (2018-10-09 at the time of this writing).

Insert your microSD card. Use Etcher to burn the image to your microSD card. This can take several minutes.

Ensure the disk is mounted again, then enable SSH.

touch /Volumes/boot/ssh

If you're planning on using the built-in WiFi on Raspberry Pi 3/Zero W or the Edimax EW-7811Un USB Wifi adapter (rtl8188cus chipset), add your Wifi configuration. Create the following file:

nano /Volumes/boot/wpa_supplicant.conf

And add this to it:

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

network={
	ssid="[SSID]"
	psk="[password]"
}

Eject your SD card and insert it into your Pi.

Plug in your Pi and give it a minute to boot and connect to your network, either over Wifi or ethernet.

Copy your public SSH key the the Pi.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

Configure your Pi.

ssh [email protected]

sudo raspi-config

That's it! 🏆

Awesome, thanks for sharing :)

Glad you found it useful!

Thank you so much for this!

Really great. Thank you! Made the set up so quick and easy!

I followed every steps, but cannot ssh to [email protected] because it asks for password. Tried raspberry but didn't work.

Thanks for pointing this out @theoctober19th. In the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS (2022-04-04), the "pi" user has been removed. I've just updated the section about writing the image with instructions on how to create the "pi" user.

Thanks @celeryclub for making setup for easy:)