Completely headless Raspberry Pi 3 B+ setup

raspberrySetup.md

Completely headless Raspberry Pi 3 B+ setup

BEFORE BOOTING

Download Linux Image

Download Rasbian Lite zip file from raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/

Find the SD card device with diskutil list

In this case, the SD card is /dev/disk4. DO NOT get this wrong or you may destroy all the data on the wrong disk/card/drive.

diskutil list

/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            159.2 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *160.0 GB   disk1
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk1s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS 160GB                   159.7 GB   disk1s2
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *320.1 GB   disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:          Apple_CoreStorage                         319.6 GB   disk2s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Boot OS X               134.2 MB   disk2s3
/dev/disk3
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:                  Apple_HFS Backup                 *319.3 GB   disk3
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *3.9 GB     disk4
   1:             Windows_FAT_32                         98.6 MB    disk4s1
   2:                      Linux                         1.9 GB     disk4s2

Umount the disk, NOT eject

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4

Write the image to the SD card with dd

cd ~/Donwloads

dd if=2018-04-18-raspbian-stretch.img of=/dev/rdisk4 bs=1m conv=sync

This might take few minutes to finish.

After burning the sd card enable ssh before booting (just create ssh file).

cd /Volumes/boot
touch ssh

While beeing in boot direcotry pass credentials for wifi, so that raspberry will automatically find anmd connect to wifi even without monitor, keyboard or mouse.

sudo nano wpa_supplicant.conf

The inside of the file should look like this:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network={
    ssid="YOUR_NETWORK_NAME"
    psk="YOUR_PASSWORD"
    key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Ctr+O to save and Ctr+X to close nano. With this file in place, Raspbian will move it in /etc/wpa_supplicant/ when the system is booted.

With this configuration you can ssh into you raspberry right after first boot.

By default Rasbian has an avahi-daemon which means that you can ssh to the machine with a domain name without knowing the ip address.

ssh pi@raspberrypi.local

password: raspberry

You might want to pass your ssh key by ssh-copy-id pi@raspberry.local so that you don't have to type your password everytime connecting to raspberry.

AFTER BOOTING

Chaning host name

First open hosts file:

sudo nano /etc/hosts

and change the host for example to this:

127.0.1.1           wheatherstation

Then open hostname file:

sudo nano /etc/hostname

and change the name to the same as previous one. Finally commit the changes:

sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh

Reboot and check the name change. After that you can do ssh pi@weatherstation.local.

And that's it - the basic configuration for a developer without spare display, keyboard, mouse, ethernet cable and patience.

It is recommended to change the password to smth different than raspberry.

passwd

Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

From here you can do whatever you want with your rasbperry. For example install node.js, add bare git repository with post-receive hooks for code deployment or install mosca client for mqtt broker. It is yout choice!