How to Quickly Configure Wireless WPA Connection on Raspberry Pi

Dmitri Popov

Productivity Sauce

Nov 13, 2012 GMT
Dmitri Popov

The latest version of the Raspbian Linux distro for Raspberry Pi contains a graphical tool for configuring and managing wireless connections, but you can easily set up a wireless connection to a WPA-protected Wi-Fi network without booting into a graphical desktop environment. Assuming that you are using a wireless adapter supported by Raspbian, run the iwconfig command to find out the correct wireless interface (in most cases, it's wlan0). Create then a backup copy of the /etc/network/interfaces network configuration file using the following command:

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.old

Open the file in the nano editor:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Locate the default configuration of the wlan0 interface which should look something like this:

allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
iface default inet dhcp

Replace it with the following profile:

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-ssid [ESSID]
wpa-psk [PASSPHRASE]

Reboot your Raspberry Pi, and it should automatically connect to the configured network.

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