Setting up your Wi-Fi network

To be able to connect to our Raspberry Pi Zero, we are going to need a working network connection. We will be using the Pi Zero W's Wi-Fi network for this. If you are using a Pi without built-in Wi-Fi, then these instructions will still work, you will just need to connect a USB Wi-Fi dongle to your Pi first.

We have been given a straightforward method of configuring our Wi-Fi connection when using our Pi in headless mode too. If we create a file called wpa_supplicant.conf in the boot partition of our Pi's SD card, upon first boot, this file is copied into the /etc/wpa_supplicant/ directory and used to configure the Wi-Fi settings for the Pi. However, this file must contain a valid set of configuration details, or your Pi will not connect to your Wi-Fi.

Here is an example of a wpa_supplicant.conf file setup to connect to the Wi-Fi network called mywifinetwork with a connection password of mypassword. You should obviously change these to match the details of your Wi-Fi network when writing your file. You can read more about the different configurations you can add to this file over at the Raspberry Pi's official documentation pages at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/wireless/wireless-cli.md:

network={
    ssid="mywifinetwork"
    psk="mypassword"
}

It is worth double checking the format and details entered here, as any mistakes in this file will stop your Pi Zero from joining your wireless network.