Sander Holvoet

Roses are red, violets are blue unexpected ‘{‘ on line 32.

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💡 Even though the article below is targeted specifically at Raspberry Pi OS (formerly called Raspbian) the steps below should work perfectly fine for any Debian based O/S, as well as any other Linux distros which use dhcpcd.

Configuring a static IP address in Raspberry Pi OS is pretty straight forward. To do so we’ll need to disable the default automatic configuration (DHCP) for the network interface in question.

Adding a static configuration

Raspberry Pi OS -like many other Linux distros- uses dhcpcd as its default DHCP client.
The configuration file of dhcpcd is located at /etc/dhcpcd.conf.

Let’s say you want to use a static IP address of 192.168.0.150, simply add the following lines:

interface eth0
static ip_address=192.168.0.150/24
static routers=192.168.0.1
static domain_name_servers=192.168.0.150 1.1.1.1 1.0.0.1
  • interface: network interface for which you want to set a static IP (usually eth0 or wlan0).
  • static ip_address: your desired static IP in CIDR notation. /24 refers to netmask 255.255.255.0.
  • static routers: IP of your router / gateway.
  • static domain_name_servers: your DNS server(s) of choice. As I’m running a Pi-hole instance on the same device, I’m specifying the same IP followed by Cloudflare’s DNS servers which will serve as a backup should my Pi-hole instance be unreachable.

This is the part you would normally reboot your Raspberry Pi (by running reboot unsurprisingly 🤷‍♂️), in order to apply your changes. Thankfully there is an easier way which doesn’t require a reboot.

Apply changes without rebooting

The command below will bring down the eth0 interface, ⏸️ pause for exactly 5 seconds and automatically bring it back up afterwards:

sudo ifconfig eth0 down && sleep 5 && sudo ifconfig eth0 up

Verify whether the network interface has been configured by running ifconfig:

...
eth0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
    👉 inet 192.168.0.150  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.0.255
        inet6 2a02:1811:c401:4d00:1eb1:5550:706c:b5d  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x0<global>
        inet6 fe80::df3d:ab2:eb31:e33d  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether dc:a6:32:22:2d:fc  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 788462  bytes 137882009 (131.4 MiB)
        RX errors 65535  dropped 65535  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 452092  bytes 85263482 (81.3 MiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
...

You should now be able to reach your Raspberry Pi using the static IP you configured 👏.

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