John Turner

Setting up a New Raspberry PI

Steps that I take to set up a new Raspberry PI. I followed these steps when I recently had to reformat one of my Pis and started from scratch.

Steps

  1. Use the Raspberry Pi Imager to flash over the 32-bit version of headless Raspbian (Lite)
    1. Important: Make sure to use the advanced settings to set up SSH and the host name of the machine for easier access later
    2. Why Not 64-bit?: Basically I got bit here by choosing 64-bit once and the software that I wanted to host (namely the Unifi controller) didn’t support 64-bit ARM architectures… So I’ll stick with 32-bit
  2. Plug the RPi into the network and wait a bit
  3. SSH into pi@HOSTNAME_CHOSEN
  4. Install vim: sudo apt-get install vim
  5. Set the static IP:
    1. sudo vim /etc/dhcpcd.conf
    2. Under interface eth0 make sure that the following exists (if I wanted to have the IP address of 192.168.1.200): static ip_address=192.168.1.200 and static routers=192.168.1.1
  6. Reboot: sudo reboot
  7. Run sudo raspi-config and set up the new password for the pi user
  8. Install whatever software desired
    1. This time around, I had to re-install from scratch the Unifi Controller (causing me to update my Restoring Unifi Controller article) and setting up a new Pi Hole from scratch, which prompted me to write more about it here:

References