Setting up WiFi connection
Start by booting the Raspberry Pi, connected to a display and a keyboard. Open up the terminal and edit the network interfaces file:
$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
This file contains all known network interfaces, it’ll probably have a line or two in there already.
Change the first line (or add it if it’s not there) to:
auto wlan0
Then at the bottom of the file, add these lines telling the Raspberry Pi to allow wlan as a network connection method and use the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf as your configuration file.
allow-hotplug wlan0 iface wlan0 inet dhcp wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf iface default inet dhcp
(ctrl-X, then type Y to quit and save)
The next step is to create this configuration file.
Configuring WiFi connection
Open up the wpa_supplicant.conf file in the editor.
$ sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
Again, some lines might already be present, just add the following.
network={
ssid="YOUR_NETWORK_NAME"
psk="YOUR_NETWORK_PASSWORD"
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP
auth_alg=OPEN
}
Make sure it works
Reboot the Raspberry Pi and it should connect to the wireless network.
sudo reboot
A static IP
Since the goal of this tutorial is to be able to work with the RPi without external keyboard or display, you want to be ssh into it. The best way is to make sure it’ll always have a static IP on your network.
Doing so is simple. Open the /etc/network/interfaces file again and add the following changes:
Change iface wlan0 inet dhcp into iface wlan0 inet static. This changes the wlan0 interface from DHCP to static.
Add the following lines before the wpa-conf line:
address 192.168.1.155 # Static IP you want netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.1.1 # IP of your router
Reboot your Raspberri Pi
sudo reboot