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How To Find IP Address Of Raspberry Pi

If you have a Raspberry Pi there is a good chance that you will want to access it over the network. We are going to show you how to find the IP address of a Raspberry Pi either over the network or while logged in with a keyboard and monitor. You can also avoid having to find the IP if you configure it statically ahead of time. You can edit your network configuration on your SD card using your laptop before even inserting it to boot from.

See this page for more details: How To Connect Raspberry Pi To Laptop Via Wifi

Keep Scrolling down for video instructions.

Locally

If you are logged in locally with a keyboard and monitor it is really easy. You can use any of these three commands. All or some of them may be installed on your system depending on your distro and version.


hostname -I
ifconfig -a
ip a

Remotely - How To Find IP Address Of Raspberry Pi

Finding the IP address remotely is also pretty easy. You are probably asking yourself any of the following:

There is a good chance that you can actually ping your Raspberry Pi using the default hostname. Rasbian multicast DNS is supported by default. This may also work on Retropie. Try either of these commands:

Ping


ping raspberrypi.local
ping retropie

You can try using the arp command. It will show any systems on your current network so long as they are in your arp cache. You will need to be on the same network ( same switch or router ). So long as you don’t have to route to another network it should work fine. Just run the following. It should work from Linux, Windows, and OSX.

ARP

ARP stands for address resolution protocol. It helps to map MAC addresses to IP addresses. You can use the arp command to see what IP to MAC mappings exist for your local network. So long as a device is on your local network it should be visible. It likely won’t take much guess work to figure out which device is your Raspberry Pi.


arp -a

Nmap - How To Find IP Address Of Raspberry Pi

You could also try searching your network with Nmap. This is a network mapping and exploration tool. It is designed for this type of task. I almost feel like this could bee seen as overkill but it isn’t that big of a deal to install and it should get the job done. You can install and run it on Debain/Ubuntu like this ( swap in your network range ).


sudo apt install nmap
sudo nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24

You should be able to tell which system is your Raspberry Pi because the line in the output for your MAC address is a dead giveaway. For example this is my Raspberry Pi router on my network as seen by nmap:

MAC Address: B8:27:EB:F6:10:3C (Raspberry Pi Foundation)

From Your Router

Another alternative option would be to login to your local router and look at what systems are connected. This is an option if you are on a home network or you happen to have access to your router. You can usually reach a consumer router using a web browser at a URL like the following: http://192.168.1.1. You might have a slightly different IP range. Adjust as needed. You should be able to login using the username/password on the bottom of your router (unless you changed the password which you should have). Once logged in you should have an option to show what devices are connected.

Video Instructions for Different Platforms

Here are a bunch of videos we created showing how to find the IP address on a Raspberry Pi and connect with SSH. We have a video for each client platform. The last video has everything combined together.

From Windows 10:

From Mac OSX:

From Ubuntu Linux:

From iOS / iPad / iPhone:

From Android:

Setup guide including all client platforms:

References