nmcli

Old advice for setting a Raspberry Pi IP address to a static IP on the Pi itself said to edit the /etc/dhcpcd.conf file, and add it there.

But on Raspberry Pi OS 12 and later, dhcpcd is no longer used, everything goes through Network Manager, which is configured via nmcli or nmtui. If you're booting into the Pi OS desktop environment, editing the IP settings there is pretty easy.

But setting a static IP via the command line is a little different.

First, get the interface information—you can get a list of all interfaces with nmcli device status:

$ nmcli device status
DEVICE         TYPE      STATE                   CONNECTION         
eth0           ethernet  connected               Wired connection 1 
lo             loopback  connected (externally)  lo                 
wlan0          wifi      disconnected            --                 

In my case, I want to set an IP on eth0, the built-in Ethernet.

Raspberry Pi OS version 12 (based on Debian 12 Bookworm) uses NetworkManager instead of dhcpcd for managing network connections, DNS resolution settings, DHCP, etc.

I've already mentioned using nmcli and nmtui for managing WiFi settings, but I ran into a strange issue after installing Docker on a fresh Raspberry Pi OS installation today. Suddenly DNS stopped working.

Trying to ping anything on the Internet gave me:

$ ping www.google.com
ping: www.google.com: Temporary failure in name resolution

As always, It was DNS. It was like DNS just gave up the ghost! Trying to change settings via nmtui seemed to not work (I tried DHCP for IPv4 with manual DNS, and that wasn't working).

Luckily, I found this post and followup comments mentioning the proper nmcli incantation to override DNS settings for an interface, so here it is (assuming built-in Ethernet):

If you haven't already, check out my full video on the Raspberry Pi 5, which inspired this post.

Raspberry Pi OS 12 'Bookworm' is coming alongside the release of the Raspberry Pi 5, and with it comes a fairly drastic change from using wpa_supplicant for WiFi interface management to everything network-related running through nmcli, or NetworkManager.

nmcli is widely adopted in Linux these days, and it makes managing WiFi, LAN, and other network connections much simpler.